MEC brings together two era-defining works that transform the concert hall into a space of encounter: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte, in which piano, percussion, and electronics make “contact” across constantly shifting timbres and spatial trajectories, and Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’étoile, which surrounds the audience with six percussionists and the signals of distant pulsars – cosmic clocks whose rotations become the very substance of the music. Master percussionist Steven Schick marks fifty years of performing Stockhausen’s landmark score, while San Diego’s red fish blue fish ventures with us into Grisey’s extraordinary meditation on sound, time, and the unknowable reaches of the universe.

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