Karlheinz Stockhausen(1928-2007)

A musical pioneer, Karlheinz Stockhausen broke many barriers and taboos. He wrote more than 300 works in various genres from opera and orchestral pieces to electronic music and complex compositions where performers, producers, helicopters, recording equipment, and audiences all together become his instruments.

He was born Karlheinz Stockhausen in the suburb of Cologne, in 1928. His father, Simon, was a school teacher, his mother, Gertrude, was an amateur pianist. He played piano from age 7, showing a perfect pitch and impressive memory. He lost both parents in WWII, being only twelve years old. At age 16 he was recruited to serve at the war hospital, where he attended hundreds of severely wounded. He studied music at Cologne Musikhochschule, at Cologne University (1945-51), at Paris Conservatory (1951-53) with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. At the University of Bonn (1954-56) he studied information theory, acoustics and composition.

Stockhausen began his experiments with live music and recorded sounds in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He played with the tape-recorded sounds of glass, metal, wood and other unconventional sources in Paris Radio Studio and at Cologne Radio (WDR) electronic studio. His experimental work at the West Deutsche Rundfunk (WDR) studio in Cologne was the leading work with recorded sound at that time. His purely electronic compositions made in 1953-54, such as "Electronic Study" (1953), were the first ever written and published works in this new genre. His ground-braking "Klavierstuck XI (1956), which features 19 elements to be performed in changing sequences, was one of the early works in aleatoric (controlled chance) music.

In the early 1960s Stockhausen collaborated with Yoko Ono in her New York loft concerts. He also staged happenings with George Maciunas and other avant-garde performers of the "Fluxus" movement. At that time he experimented with cross-genre shows where musicians and audiences all together become performers in a setting that provoked imagination and inventiveness. and various non-musical objects, and even people in the audience were also used as musical instruments. Although details of such experimentations could not be registered in notation, the breakthrough was that any person could come out of the audiences and join the performers in making music.

In 1968 Stockhausen wrote the conceptual "From Seven Days" after living completely alone and without food, being influenced by Sri Aurobindo. In "Ylem" (1972) he instructs 19 musicians to establish telepathic communication with each other while performing this 26-minute happening. His "Helikopter-Streichquartett" (1992-95) was written for 4 musicians performing on 4 flying helicopters with electronic video and sound inter-com technology, and was performed and recorded in 1996 several times by the Arditti Quartet on helicopters provided by the Austrian Army. Stockhausen's largest work took him 25 years to complete. It is the mega-opera consisting of seven operas, one 24-hour opera for each day of the week, is entitled "Licht" (Light, 1977-2003).

In the course of his career spanning over 60 years, Stockhausen created over 300 compositions, presenting a conceptual mix of occidental an oriental cultures. His thought-provoking output was cited as an influence by the The Beatles, Yoko Ono, Kraftwerk, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Herbie Hancock, and Björk. Stockhausen appeared on the cover of The Beatles' album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with Paul McCartney, one of his numerous fans across the universe.

Outside of his entertainment profession, Stockhausen was a highly unusual and sometimes controversial figure. His comment about the tragedy of 9/11 as "the work of art" attracted much controversy. He later apologized for the reaction to the comment, but said that he was misquoted and misunderstood. Stockhausen was married twice and had six children. He died of natural causes on December 5, 2007, in Kuerten, and was laid to rest in the Forest cemetery in Kuerten, Germany.