Watch Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Great Helicopter String Quartet, Starring 4 Musicians, 4 Cameras & 4 Copters — openculture.com

Here in Los Angeles, we learn to live with helicopters. Whether police, news, or unidentifiable, these great mechanical hummingbirds buzz over the city in a kind of omnipresence that can drive new arrivals nuts. The movies have turned helicopters into a visual icon of Los Angeles, but in real life they’ve become more like the city’s sonic signature, to the point where the distinctively rapid, repetitive thump of their rotor blades sometimes bleeds into our dreams. Whether or not innovative German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen spent much time here I don’t know, but he, too, dreamt of helicopters, and the inspiration this vision granted him led to his 1993 Helikopter-Streichquartett, also known as the Helicopter String Quartet. You can see a 2012 Birmingham performance by the Elysian String Quartet above. And no, the piece doesn’t mean “Helicopter” as any kind of metaphor; you’ve got to have not just one but four of the things to properly play it.

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