While on staff at the New York Philharmonic, I was asked to help Music Director Alan Gilbert develop a planned evening of “spatial” music at the enormous Park Avenue Armory on NYC’s Upper East Side. The centerpiece was a performance of Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras that encircle the audience, with additional works by Gabrieli, Ives, Boulez and Mozart that all had multiple performance locations in their DNA.

Working together with Gilbert and the show’s stage director Michael Counts, we developed a surround-sound experience with multiple surprises to jolt the audience’s perspective. We had a lot of fun experimenting with various elements of the evening, including making use of the opera chorus to create atmosphere between pieces, including a striking tableau vivant as guests entered the Armory venue.

How do 300 orchestra members, 50 vocalists, and 1500 audience members navigate a custom venue for a show that has no plot? The intricacies of people-moving were my main issue to solve, so I scrutinized the musical scores for ideas and even created large-scale maps akin to football diagrams so that everyone could visualize their journeys from one stage to another. During the production week, myriad artistic issues arose from working in a 55,000 square foot drill hall, such as musical coordination with strained sight lines and delayed sound over vast distances.

I brought in auxiliary conductors to provide reinforcement of the beat (kind of like radio repeater stations) for the opera singers running through the crowd during the selections from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The overall effect was unnervingly loose, but it illustrated Mozart’s original concept of a party with music coming from multiple rooms. The whole project felt like a wild guessing game to see what might work in this unique setting, and while not every choice was an unalloyed success, I felt the project shattered a lot of audience expectations for an engaging evening.