Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen: The Composer Who Rebuilt the Parameters

In 1993 he wrote a string quartet for four players in four airborne helicopters, bows and rotor blades mixed live and relayed to an audience on the ground. It was not a stunt. He had already scattered loudspeakers around audiences, proposed spherical concert halls, extended serial technique from pitch to duration to timbre to physical space, and begun a cycle of seven operas named for the days of the week. He finished a commission the night before he died.

Hadamar, and a Stretcher

Born on 22 August 1928 at Burg Mödrath near Kerpen, outside Cologne, he was the son of Simon Stockhausen, a schoolteacher, and Gertrud, from prosperous farming stock. Gertrud suffered a breakdown in 1932 and was institutionalised; on 27 May 1941 she was murdered at the Hadamar killing facility as part of the Nazi euthanasia programme. Simon went missing in action and was presumed killed in Hungary. In 1944–45 the teenager worked as a stretcher bearer at Bedburg. The man who spent his life reorganising music from first principles had first watched the ordinary world dispose of both his parents.

Cologne, Paris, and Information Theory

He studied at the Hochschule für Musik Köln from 1947 to 1951 and, at the University of Cologne, took musicology, philosophy and German. He worked with the Swiss composer Frank Martin in 1950, went to Paris in 1952 to study analysis and aesthetics with Olivier Messiaen, and — the decisive move — spent 1954 to 1956 in Bonn studying phonetics and information theory under Werner Meyer-Eppler. From 1951 he was a fixture of the Darmstadt summer courses. Almost no composer of the period had that combination: French modernist pedigree plus a working command of acoustics as a science.

The Studio

In 1953 he joined the WDR Electronic Music Studio in Cologne as assistant to Herbert Eimert and succeeded him as director in 1963, running it until 1977. *Gesang der Jünglinge* (1955–56) is the groundbreaking work of the electronic repertoire. *Gruppen* (1955–57) is written for three orchestras. *Kontakte* (1958–60) demonstrated the isomorphism of pitch, duration, dynamics and timbre — one continuum, four names. *Mixtur* and *Mikrophonie I* pioneered live electronics. For Expo '70 in Osaka he designed the German Pavilion as a spherical auditorium ringed with loudspeakers, where roughly a million visitors heard five and a half hours of his music a day.

The Theory

He was as influential on paper as in sound. "… wie die Zeit vergeht …" ("How Time Passes"), published in *Die Reihe* volume 3 in 1957, argued for scales of tempo, field composition and statistical composition, and is the most celebrated of his theoretical writings. He generated the working vocabulary of a generation: pointillism, moment form, group composition, variable and polyvalent forms, formula composition, and — in *Aus den sieben Tagen* (1968) — "intuitive music." His collected writings run to ten volumes of *Texte zur Musik*. His scores themselves were objects: rotatable elements, colour-coded dynamics. Frustrated with publishers, he founded Stockhausen-Verlag in the early 1970s to issue his own, and it won nine German Music Publishers Society awards between 1992 and 2009; in the early 1990s he started a record label to reissue his own recordings.

Sgt. Pepper and the Long Reach

Pierre Boulez declared him "the greatest living composer." Stravinsky organised private sessions to listen to his work. Harrison Birtwistle and Brian Ferneyhough acknowledged the debt; Wolfgang Rihm studied with him in 1972–73. Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock, Yusef Lateef and Anthony Braxton all cited him. So did Frank Zappa on *Freak Out!*, Pete Townshend, Rick Wright and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Kraftwerk and Björk. Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, who founded Can, came out of his Cologne Courses. The Beatles put his face on the cover of *Sgt. Pepper*, and both "A Day in the Life" and "Revolution 9" bear his fingerprints. Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon name-checked him in novels. He is one of very few avant-garde composers ever to have penetrated popular consciousness.

Licht, and Klang

From 1977 to 2003 he wrote *LICHT*: seven full-length operas, one per day of the week, roughly twenty-nine hours of music built around the archetypal figures Michael, Lucifer and Eve. He followed it with *KLANG* (2004–07), twenty-one pieces for the hours of the day, including *Cosmic Pulses* with its twenty-four superimposed layers. Around these sat *Momente*, *Hymnen*, *Stimmung* — a vocal sextet built entirely on overtones — *Mantra* for two pianos and electronics, and *Tierkreis* (1974–75), the zodiac cycle that became his most widely performed music. The final tally: some 370 to 376 independently performable works across nearly sixty years.

September 2001

On 18 September 2001 a journalist at a press conference asked what he made of the attacks in New York a week earlier. Stockhausen called them "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos," describing people who had prepared "fanatically for a concert" after which "5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment." Pressed on whether he was equating art and crime, he said it was a crime "because those involved didn't consent. They didn't come to the 'concert.'" He began backing away before the press conference ended and apologised formally the next day. The Hamburg Music Festival cancelled four concerts of his music. It was the most damaging thing he ever said, and it was not an accident of phrasing: it was the logical terminus of a lifetime spent regarding events as structures.

Why Karlheinz Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is systematising invention. Stockhausen did not primarily write pieces; he invented the categories other people's pieces would later occupy. His central theoretical insight — set out in "How Time Passes" and realised in *Kontakte* — is that rhythm and pitch are the same phenomenon observed at different speeds, which means duration, timbre and pitch can be composed with a single unified logic. That is a genuine discovery about the physics of sound, not a matter of taste, and it is why the phonetics and information theory he learned from Meyer-Eppler mattered more than any conservatory training. He then added space as a compositional parameter, treating a loudspeaker's position as no less structural than a note's. Boulez's verdict — "the greatest living composer" — was not eccentric; Stravinsky listened privately, and the term "father of electronic music" has stuck.

The counter-case is substantial. The systems produced a great deal of music that even sympathetic listeners find inert, and the theory has often outlived the sound. His reputation was, to an unusual degree, self-administered: his own publishing house, his own record label, his own summer courses, his own foundation, and personal control of over a hundred recordings and nearly every premiere. The pop citations are frequently offered as proof of importance when they mostly prove name recognition — the Beatles put his face on a sleeve. And the cosmology hardened over time into something closer to private religion than argument. September 2001 exposed the cost of a mind that could see 5,000 deaths as a formal event first. Genius, in his case, is not a compliment about beauty. It is a description of restless structural intelligence, with the humane parts left conspicuously unfinished.

Legacy

He took the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1986, the UNESCO Picasso Medal in 1992 and the Polar Music Prize in 2001, along with honorary doctorates and academy memberships across Europe and America. The Stockhausen Courses at Kürten, begun in 1998, still draw well over a hundred participants a year. He died of sudden heart failure at Kürten on 5 December 2007, aged seventy-nine. Every laptop musician layering sound in space is working inside a grammar he wrote.