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In 1988, the composer Brian Ferneyhough remarked on the pioneering innovation of a goliath of western music. \u2018I doubt that there has been a single composer of the intervening generation who, even if for a short time, did not see the world of music differently thanks to the work of Stockhausen.\u2019 <\/p>
Few composers have shone so brightly, and with such intensity of vision, as this child of a Germany shattered following years of extremism and war. And few have ignited such controversy \u2013 or passion for and against their music.<\/p>
Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in 1928 in Burg M\u00f6drath, near Cologne, to fervently Catholic parents. Encouraged with piano lessons to develop his evident musical gifts, his early life was marked by personal as well as collective tragedy: while his schoolteacher father perished in battle, his mentally ill mother was \u2018euthanised\u2019 by the Nazis; as a teenaged stretcher-bearer he witnessed many horrors firsthand.<\/p>
Wartime radio made a profound impact on Stockhausen and led to an enduring hatred of music with a regular or marching beat. Following the war, he undertook musical studies at the Hochschule f\u00fcr Musik and Cologne University, where he also studied philosophy and German.<\/p>
There, Stockhausen encountered previously censored composers such as Bart\u00f3k<\/a><\/strong>, Hindemith<\/a><\/strong> and Stravinsky<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 and read Hesse\u2019s The Glass Bead Game<\/i>, a novel that would prove highly significant in its depiction of a future in which the profoundest expression of human understanding is a music informed by austere, ritualised games, philosophy and mathematics. <\/p> This, and the discovery in 1949 of Schoenberg<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s 12-tone<\/a> <\/strong>(or serial) music, set the young composer on a path in which the search for unity \u2013 musical, human and divine \u2013 would lead him in radical new directions, yet place him firmly within the Central European tradition of Beethoven<\/a><\/strong> and Wagner<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p> It was Webern<\/a><\/strong> and Messiaen<\/a> <\/strong>who provided the creative catalyst; in particular the Frenchman (with whom he would briefly study) and his Mode de valeurs et d\u2019intensit\u00e9s<\/i>, encountered by Stockhausen in 1951 during a revelatory first visit to Darmstadt. This was the site of a soon-to-become famous international summer school, founded in 1946 and which Stockhausen would come to dominate through the 1950s and \u201960s as a pedagogue-cum-guru. <\/p> What grabbed him in Messiaen\u2019s \u2018fantastic music of the stars\u2019 was the numerical organisation, not just of musical pitch (as Schoenberg had done in his way), but of duration, dynamics and timbre, or intensity of attack. Inspired by Webern\u2019s abstract approach, Stockhausen \u2013 together with Boulez<\/a><\/strong> and other Darmstadt radicals \u2013 extended this into a \u2018total serialism\u2019 whereby every musical parameter was rigorously determined by a mathematically inspired compositional process.<\/p> An early work using these techniques was Kontra-Punkte<\/i> (1952-53). Here, dissociated \u2018points\u2019 of sound were transformed into \u2018groups\u2019 of notes. The composer later remarked that it comprised \u2018not the same shapes in a changing light\u2019 (\u00e0 la Webern) but rather \u2018different shapes in the same, all-pervading light\u2019. For composer Berio, it was \u2018an indisputable masterpiece\u2019 \u2013 and the first of many.<\/p> Far from resting on his new-found ideas, Stockhausen produced innovations with each ensuing piece. Central to his thinking was a spirituality which stemmed from his religious youth and would grow into an all-embracing, sci-fi-inspired mysticism (he later claimed to come from the Sirius star system). <\/p> While increasingly wackily expressed, that sensibility underlay Stockhausen\u2019s endeavours from the start, including his pioneering exploration of the spatial dimension in music, a possibility beautifully afforded by electronics.<\/p>Stockhausen and Darmstadt<\/h3>
What music did Stockhausen compose?<\/h2>