Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer (born August 22nd 1928 in Mödrath, near Cologne, died December 5th 2007 in Kuerten).

Stockhausen composed 370 individually performable works, published 10 volumes of TEXTE zur MUSIK/ TEXTS about MUSIC, and a series of booklets comprising sketches and explanations about his own works (Stockhausen-Verlag).

His first 36 scores were published by Universal Edition in Vienna and, since its establishment in 1975, the Stockhausen-Verlag has published the rest of his works. In 1991, the Stockhausen-Verlag also began to release compact discs in the Stockhausen Complete Edition which comprises 139 compact discs to date. All Stockhausen scores, CDs, books, videos and music boxes may be ordered directly by mail or e-mail (Kettenberg 15, 51515 Kuerten, Germany; Fax: + 49 (0)2268-1813;www.stockhausen.org / stockhausen-verlag@stockhausen.org).

Since 1998, the Stockhausen Courses Kürten for composers, interpreters, musicologists and auditors take place annually.

In 1977, Stockhausen began to compose the music-scenic work LICHT (LIGHT) The Seven Days of the Week. LICHT with its Seven Days of the Week comprises about 29 hours of music: THURSDAY from LIGHT 240 minutes; SATURDAY from LIGHT 185 minutes; MONDAY from LIGHT, 278 minutes; TUESDAY from LIGHT 156 minutes; FRIDAY from LIGHT 290 minutes; WEDNESDAY from LIGHT 267 minutes; SUNDAY from LIGHT 298 minutes.

Following the world première on October 16th 2004 of LICHT-BILDER (LIGHT PICTURES), the last scene Stockhausen composed of his work LICHT (LIGHT), Stockhausen began the work KLANG (SOUND), The 24 Hours of the Day. Until 2007, he composed the 1st Hour HIMMELFAHRT (ASCENSION) to the 21st Hour PARADIES (PARADISE).

Already the first compositions of “Point Music” such as KREUZSPIEL (CROSS-PLAY) in 1951, SPIEL (PLAY) for orchestra in 1952, and KONTRA-PUNKTE (COUNTER-POINTS) in 1952/53, brought Stockhausen international fame. Since then, his works have been opposed to the extreme by some and admired by others. Fundamental achievements in music since 1950 are indelibly imprinted through his compositions: The “Serial Music”, the“Point Music”, the “Electronic Music”, the “New Percussion Music”, the “Variable Music”, the “New Piano Music”, the “Space Music”, “Statistical Music”, “Aleatoric Music”, “Live Electronic Music”; new syntheses of “Music and Speech”, of a “Musical Theatre”, of a “Ritual Music”, “Scenic Music”; the “Group Composition”, polyphonic “Process Composition”, “Moment Composition”, “Formula Composition” to the present “Multi-Formula Composition”; the integration of “found objects” (national anthems, folklore of all countries, short-wave events, “sound scenes”, etc.) into a “World Music” and a “Universal Music”; the synthesis of European, African, Latin American and Asian music into a “Telemusic”; the vertical “Octophonic Music”.

From the beginning until now, his work can be classified as “Spiritual Music”; this becomes more and more evident not only in the compositions with spiritual texts, but also in the other works via “Overtone Music”, “Intuitive Music”, “Mantric Music”, reaching “Cosmic Music” in STIMMUNG (TUNING), AUS DEN SIEBEN TAGEN (FROM THE SEVEN DAYS), MANTRA, STERNKLANG (STAR SOUND), INORI, ATMEN GIBT DAS LEBEN (BREATHING GIVES LIFE), SIRIUS, LICHT (LIGHT), KLANG (SOUND).

In a spherical auditorium conceived by the Stockhausen, most of his works composed until 1970 were performed at the Expo ’70 world fair in Osaka, Japan for 5! hours daily for 183 days by twenty instrumentalists and singers, thereby reaching an audience of over a million listeners.

Stockhausen is the perfect example of the composer who – at nearly all world premières and in innumerable exemplary performances and recordings of his works world-wide – either personally conducted, or performed in or directed the performance as sound projectionist.

In addition to numerous guest professorships in Switzerland, the United States, Finland, Holland, and Denmark, Stockhausen was appointed Professor for Composition at the State Conservatory in Cologne in 1971. In 1996 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Free University in Berlin, and in 2004 received an honorary doctorate from the Queen’s University in Belfast. He is a member of 12 international Academies for the Arts and Sciences, was named Honorary Citizen of Kürten in 1988, became Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, received many gramophone prizes and, among other honours, the Federal Medal of Merit, 1st class, the Siemens Music Prize, the UNESCO Picasso Medal, the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine Westfalia, 8 awards from the German Music Publisher’s Society for his score publications, the Hamburg BACH Prize, the Cologne Culture Prize and, in 2001, the Polar Music Prize with the laudation: “

Karlheinz Stockhausen is being awarded the Polar Music Prize for 2001 for a career as a composer that has been characterized by impeccable integrity and never-ceasing creativity, and for having stood at the forefront of musical development for fifty years.”

“And at a stroke I became aware that all the differences in cultures and languages, and in the compositions of individual composers, are dialects, and that the fundamental measure of them all is the same: the intervals.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

“It happens every once in a while, in music as in other fields, that you find people specializing in one new aspect of musical forming, and becoming famous because they just specialize. A composer like Ligeti specialized for years in microstructures, the detailed composition of textures; or Xenakis, who has concentrated on stochastic distributions; or Penderecki, who was the cluster specialist for a long time. Every once in a while music produces its specialists, people who go very deeply into their narrow specializations, and vary them all the time. This is something we take for granted in painting, more than in music. Everyone has his so-called personal style. By which is meant that he has narrowed down his field of activity so completely that it only takes a fragment of a work for you to say, ah, that’s so and so.
And we can really say that universalists are becoming very rare in all fields, all the sciences. I tell my own students, if you want to become famous just take a magnifying glass and put it to one of my scores, and what you see there, just multiply that for five years. For example, if you see snare drums, then you start composing around twenty pieces only for snare drums. Snare drums of all different sizes: for fifty snare drums, for twenty, for thirty – snare drums on the roof, snare drums in the basement, big snare drums and very tiny snare drums, snare drums amplified and intermodulated. Then he will be the snare drum specialist, he will be know in Japan, he will be famous everywhere.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

“If you discover something really new, which affects human experience, I mean, there’s no discussion, that’s just the way it is. All the rest is minor talk about little details.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

“The whole movement [in America] toward a so-called pop art, in the visual arts as well as in music, I see as a disaster, really shameful for mankind, once orientated toward the highest, whose only goal in art was to glorify the divine and the cosmic spirit, and for whom everything in the human world was related to these invisible worlds. That this is now replaced, generally speaking, by garbage art, which celebrates material impermanence and decay, is a disgrace. It needs a tremendous mysticism to adore God through garbage; it is possible, but when you reach a point where images of a lipstick or hot dog have the same significance as the crucifix or Madonna in earlier cultures, it shows where a country is heading.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

“It’s the same with all those conductors who shut themselves off from everything new. I look upon them as undertakers, exploiters of dead composers. They’re the Herods of modern music.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

“Look at all the radio and television programmes, the endless series of programmes meant to explain everything about everything. Do you know what’s come into the mind of my gardener these days? He’s gone along to West German Radio and said: ‘Look, here I am. My business is gardens and I want to talk about gardening.’ I assume that the chap hasn’t done anything up to now except spend his time putting manure on my roses and looking after them and those of other employers like me; but now he’s gone up a step, and from this moment he’ll be a radio panelist. Instead of manuring and cultivating, he’ll talk about manuring and cultivating; he’ll explain how and why his tomatoes are redder and bigger than anyone else’s. In a word, endless chatter. The point is this. Can you tell me how it is that all of a sudden the craze for knowledge has sprung up, this verbal mania, while the thing that counts above all is intuition: understand the secret of a work of art and, why not, the mysteries of a rose? Excessive reasoning will end up destroying the faculty of understanding and knowing about things in depth. Words are often misleading and therefore dangerous…I’ve always believed, and I still believe, that in order to describe a bird, you first have to kill it.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

“…art consists also of craft—that is to say, complete technical mastery. As for music, several lives aren’t enough to get near it.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

“Schoenberg’s great achievement…was to claim freedom for composers: freedom from the prevailing taste of society and its media; freedom for music to evolve without interference. In other words, here was a composer who made it clear to society that he would not allow himself to be kicked about like Mozart who was kicked in the backside by a court official of the Archbishop of Salzburg when he was eight days late returning from a vacation in Vienna.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

The Beatles’ affection for Stockhausen stems from their salad days in Germany, where they heard his music on the radio. His electronic music was an enormous influence on the band, and they admired the composer so much that they enshrined him on the pantheon of their 1967 landmark album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He sits in the back row, fifth from the left, wedged between Lenny Bruce and WC Fields.

However, the connections don’t stop there. Stockhausen’s influence can be heard in the backwards tape effects on “Strawberry Fields Forever”, and John Lennon’s tape piece “Revolution No. 9″ is an homage to the composer. More specifically, it is a tribute to Hymnen, the massive electronic piece which was released a year before The Beatles recorded The White Album.

In early 1969, Stockhausen was working on his orchestral commission from the New York Philharmonic. He was living in Madison, Connecticut, some 90 miles outside of New York City. In the middle of an enormous snowstorm, he drove down to the city to meet The Beatles at Lukas Foss’ apartment in Manhattan. The band wanted to do a joint concert with Stockhausen to bridge the worlds of rock and avant-garde music. The storm, however, was too intense for The Beatles’ side to show up. After waiting for hours, Stockhausen gave up and drove home.

By the summer of that year, The Beatles had entered into their protracted and painfully public divorce, and the world never got the treat of a Stockhausen/Beatles collaboration, sadly. Stockhausen lamented the missed opportunity, “In my eyes, John Lennon was the most important mediator between popular and serious music of this century.” In his post-Beatles life, John Lennon would frequently call up Stockhausen to talk about music.

And it wasn’t just The Beatles who drew inspiration from Stockhausen’s work. He had a tremendous impact on countless musicians. Miles Davis once quipped that his band and Stockhausen’s were playing the same music “but mine plays it better”. When Stockhausen was teaching at UC Davis, members of the Grateful Dead turned out to hear his lectures. Even artists as contemporary as Bjork remain enamored of Stockhausen. She quite famously interviewed the composer once and made no attempt to hide her admiration of him.

FURTHER READING:
– Brian Epstein’s frantic telegram to Stockhausen asking for permission to include him on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover.