Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen (* August 22, 1928, Mödrath; † January 5, 2007, Kürten-Kettenberg) is considered a pioneer of electronic and New Music and one of the most important composers of the 20th century. The son of a teacher, he initially grew up in the strictly Catholic Altenberg. His father disappeared in the war, his mother died in a sanatorium, and he himself worked as a teenager in a field hospital, but managed to graduate from school on his own in 1947 and then began studying music, philosophy, and German studies in Cologne. In 1951, Stockhausen composed his first piece, "Kreuzspiel," and met Herbert Eimert at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, who then persuaded him in 1953 to work at the Studio for Electronic Music at WDR in Cologne, whose artistic direction the composer took over in 1963. Darmstadt also inspired him to go to Paris to study with Olivier Messiaen, where, through discussions with his teacher and young colleagues like Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, he developed the concept of music meticulously planned down to the last detail, structured in groups and series. Karlheinz Stockhausen achieved public recognition in 1956 with the collage-like, synthetic "Gesang der Jünglinge," having previously explored the spatial effect of sounds, noises, and artificial sound generation with sine wave generators ("Studien I/II," 1953/54). Subsequently, he explored the limits of electronic music until the mid-sixties, taught at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, directed the Cologne Courses for New Music between 1963 and 1969, was invited to universities in Basel, Philadelphia, and California, and was appointed professor at the Cologne University of Music in 1971. With "Telemusik" (1966), Karlheinz Stockhausen expanded the forms of expression in electronic and serial music to include the idea of intuition, and soon thereafter, through contact with Asian cultures, spirituality. Stockhausen presented his soundscapes at the World Expo in Osaka in 1970, composed works such as "Mantra for two pianists," and began the conceptual development of the seven-evening music theater cycle "Licht" (1977–2003), the realization of a vision of a total work of art that could be planned down to the last directorial detail. Over the decades, he created more than 280 compositions. Karlheinz Stockhausen received numerous awards, from the Federal Cross of Merit (1974) to the Swedish Polar Music Prize (2001), and is considered a significant inspiration for entire artistic circles, from Joseph Beuys to Kraftwerk to techno DJs, who cited him as an influence.