Karlheinz Stockhausen R.I.P.

[mikeweil]

I just read the news on a German language classical music forum that renowned composer Stockhausen has passed - R.I.P.

[sidewinder]

More sad news. RIP - and a hugely influential figure not only in classical music but also via influence on Miles, Zappa etc. I guess this must be big headline stuff on the German news tonight, yes?

Way too many musical passings this year..

[umum_cypher]

It'll be a nonstop Klavierstucke tribute party in my house this weekend.

[king ubu]

You'll find plenty of news via google news, for instance this one here (Guardian):

Composer Stockhausen dies aged 79

Obituary: Karlheinz Stockhausen

David Batty and agencies

Friday December 7, 2007

Guardian Unlimited

Karlheinz Stockhausen, a controversial giant of 20th century musical modernism whose works were seldom embraced by mainstream concert audiences, has died at the age of 79, it was announced today.

Endlessly prolific, whether in fashion or out of it, he composed 362 works, including the world's longest opera, Licht, a sequence of seven pieces - one for every day of the week. The whole piece lasts 29 hours.

News of his death was released by the clarinettist Suzanne Stephens and flautist Kathinka Pasveer, two "companions" who had been associated with him for than 30 years and performed many of his works.

"In friendship and gratitude for everything that he has given to us personally and to humanity through his love and his music, we bid farewell to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who lived to bring celestial music to humans, and human music to the celestial beings, so that man may listen to God and God may hear His children," they said in a statement.

"On December 5, he ascended with joy through heaven's door in order to continue to compose in paradise with cosmic pulses in eternal harmony." They added that they would continue to protect Stockhausen's music. Their farewell was appropriate for a composer who never courted popularity or convention and in his later years continued to plough a lonely furrow.

Born in 1928 in a village near Cologne, he trained first with the Swiss composer Frank Martin before making one of the key decisions of his life: he headed to Paris in 1952 to study with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud.

Works hailed by enthusiasts (including the Beatles, who included him on the cover of the Sergeant Pepper album) as masterpieces included Gruppen (1955-57). The work is written for 109 players divided into three groups laid out before and to either side of the audience.

Stimmung, his extended 70-minute piece for six voices, "completely refashioned the very idea of what a vocal ensemble might do and be", according to Paul Hillier, whose new recording was released last month.

Reviewing the disc, the Guardian music critic Andrew Clements described the work as "a vast elaboration of a single six-note chord based on the overtones of the note B flat" and added: "Stimmung is one of the masterpieces of the last half century. Like all the greatest music it is unclassifiable - part meditation, part gigantic motet, part phonetic game - and totally resistant to imitation."

Stockhausen embraced the new world of electronics. In a studio at the Paris Technical College, he laboured to produce "a structure, to be realised in an étude, that was already worked into the micro-dimension of a single sound, so that in every moment, however small, the overall principle of my idea would be present".

He also developed his own take on serialism and declared in the early 1970s that "serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever; it's relativity and nothing else . . . it's a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world". The world moved on but Stockhausen refused to have anything to do with minimalists and post-modernists. And they chose to have nothing to do with him.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,,2224071,00.html

[king ubu]

there's a thread started by mikeweil in the misc. music section already! r.i.p.

[7/4]

Sad news, caught me off guard. RIP.

[gslade]

to celebrate his life and work

also J.O.S. Birthday

I think I will play random selections of both of these artists work

an Aleatory cadavre d'exqusite of sorts

[7/4]

December 7, 2007

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer, Is Dead at 79

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:55 p.m. ET

BERLIN (AP) -- Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose innovative electronic works made him one of the most important composers of the postwar era, has died at age 79.

Stockhausen, who gained fame through his avant-garde works in the 1960s and '70s and later moved into composing works for huge theaters and other projects, died Wednesday, Germany's Music Academy said, citing members of his family. No cause of death was given.

He is known for his electronic compositions that are a radical departure from musical tradition and incorporate influences as varied as the visual arts, the acoustics of a particular concert hall, and psychology.

Stockhausen was considered by some an eccentric member of the European musical elite and by others a courageous pioneer in the field of new music. Rock and pop musicians such as John Lennon, Frank Zappa and David Bowie have cited him as an influence, and he is also credited with having influenced techno music.

Stockhausen sparked controversy in 2001, when he described the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as ''the greatest work of art one can imagine'' during a news conference in the northern German city of Hamburg, where several of the suicide pilots had lived.

The composer later apologized, but the city still canceled performances of his concerts.

Stockhausen was born in the village of Moedrath near Cologne in western Germany on Aug. 22, 1928. His father was killed in World War II and his mother also died, leaving him orphaned as a teenager.

After completing his studies in musicology, philosophy and German literature at the University of Cologne, he went on to study under composer Olivier Messiaen in Paris from 1952 to 1953, where he also met his French contemporary Pierre Boulez.

Stockhausen wrote more than 280 works, including more than 140 pieces of electronic or electro-acoustic music and brought out more than 100 different albums.

He was known for conducting nearly all of the premiere performances of his works.

The composer is survived by six children from two marriages. Services were not immediately announced.

[WD45]

Will listen to Stimmung in memory this weekend. Bummer.

[Robert J]

I first heard him when I was a teen going through my mom's "Enjoyment of Music" LPs. He probably opened me to new music in general.

[7/4]

memorial program

[7/4]

That's just strange. Most musicians put the score on a music stand.

Very cool photo!

Edited December 7, 2007 by 7/4

[B. Clugston]

Sad news. A very adventurous figure. I wish it was easier to buy his CDs, instead of the current 'send a money order and we'll send your CDs on the next milk truck' system.

[7/4]

and they're real expensive too.

[7/4]

[Spontooneous]

Indeed. Maybe Stockhausen Verlag will rethink the way they sell those things.

Hey, both those wire service obits are really bad, aren't they?

One of my favorite late-night listens is Gruppen, loud as heck. I'll do that again tonight.

[brownie]

Was very much into Stockhausen years ago.

Saw him perform in Paris in the early '70s.

Sad news...

[clifford_thornton]

Even before I was into jazz, I listened to my dad's Stockhausen, Nono, Kagel and Cage LPs. He was certainly a formative influence, despite revising my opinions of his work in recent years.

RIP, and thank you.

[7/4]

http://www.sequenza21.com/index.php/637#comments

check out the youtube link, when I mouse over there are links to multiple videos.

[7/4]

Our friend Alex Ross on Stockhausen.

[7/4]

From the Los Angeles Times

Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928 - 2007

Influential experimental composer of grandiose works

By Mark Swed

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 8, 2007

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the great German composer who envisioned music as a force of cosmic revolution and who himself became a musical force of nature, having an unprecedented impact on both high and popular post-World War II culture, has died. He was 79.

Stockhausen died Wednesday at his home in Kurten, Germany, according to an announcement on his website. No cause of death was given.

At the height of his fame in the 1960s, his name became synonymous with the future of music. His experiments with the structure of sound and his innovations with electronics made him a pioneer of the musical avant-garde but also attracted the attention of the most venturesome jazz and pop groups. He helped inspire Miles Davis' most extreme musical experiments, and the Beatles included Stockhausen's photograph on the collage cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

Although he never minded the attention, Stockhausen remained the epitome of the uncompromising artist. He was a prolific composer of 362 works. He wrote numerous texts explaining his often arcane theories. He taught courses about his music and encouraged acolytes. He demanded selfless devotion from his chosen performers, many of them members of his extended family. A true visionary, he never let expense or practical matters stand in his way. He cared little for worldly possessions and was photographed for decades wearing the same jacket.

Among his most important pieces was what has come to be considered the first classic electronic score, "Gesang der Junglinge" (Song of the Youths), which he described in 1955 as the birth of space music. Another classic, from 1958, is "Gruppen," which requires three orchestras and conductors. Once, when asked what he might suggest be programmed with the difficult score for a performance by student ensembles at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, Stockhausen replied that the evening should be "Gruppen," a lecture on "Gruppen" and then "Gruppen" again.

"He was the rock star of my youth," Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director, said Friday. "When I was a teenager, my classmates listened to rock and pop, but I got the same kind of kicks listening to Stockhausen."

In "Gesang," Stockhausen worked by splicing magnetic tape by hand. "The resulting richness of the sound," Salonen said, "is more expressive than a lot of computer-generated music despite today's far superior technology. It all boils down to somebody being a real composer."

But Salonen also says that he, like many of his generation of Stockhausen admirers, couldn't relate to the late works, especially "Licht" (Light). A cycle of seven long operas, one for each day of the week, "Licht" took Stockhausen 26 years to complete and is the most grandiose project in the history of a grandiose art form.

By the time he wrote "Sonntag" (Sunday) in 2003, Stockhausen had become a mystic. He was ridiculed for the prophetic cavorting of biblical characters and all manner of strange goings-on in the cycle. In "Freitag" (Friday), a typewriter copulates with a copying machine. In "Mittwoch" (Wednesday), four helicopters circle above the theater carrying members of a string quartet, their music piped back into the hall, mixed with the propeller noise.

Yet his music never lost its amazing power to draw a listener in and to sound completely fresh and original. Though an environmentally objectionable way to produce music, the Helicopter Quartet turned out to be a dazzling work.

And Stockhausen always managed to find new fans to take the place of the older ones he alienated. The bins of his exorbitantly priced, self-produced CDs at Amoeba Records in Hollywood are a small mecca for ultra-hip listeners. Bjork has repeatedly mentioned Stockhausen as an influence.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born Aug. 22, 1928, in Modrath, near Cologne. By the age of 16, he was an orphan. His father, a Catholic schoolteacher who became a German army officer, never returned from World War II. His mother, who suffered from severe depression, was one of the first victims of Hitler's "euthanasia policy." Stockhausen's own wartime experience was as stretcher-bearer in a military hospital.

Although he said one effect the war had on him was a lifelong phobia about march rhythms, he did not begin his music career as a radical. In Cologne, he studied piano and music education, then philosophy and musicology, working his way through school playing piano for an operetta company and playing jazz in nightclubs.

A local music critic, Herbert Eimert, introduced Stockhausen to some of the more progressive new music that had sprung up in Europe after the war. In 1951, he attended the summer sessions in Darmstadt, Germany, which was the center of Serialism, a method of developing Schoenberg's 12-tone technique into a highly rigorous means of mathematically determining all aspects of music. With a new wife, Doris Andreae, Stockhausen went to Paris in 1952 to study with composer Olivier Messiaen and came into contact with Pierre Boulez, who was also entranced by the latest discoveries of Serialism.

Stockhausen's first pieces from this time, such as "Kontra-Punkte" (Counterpoints), already revealed an ear for striking new textures and fantastically intricate techniques of organization. Back in Cologne the next year, he began applying these methods to producing electronic music, and in the next several years created major works for tape, instruments and combinations of the two. In "Kontakte," "Mikrophonie" and "Mixtur," he helped lead the way in developing instrumental music that was electronically altered during performance. Meanwhile, his theoretical studies into the nature of time and perception led him to develop increasingly convoluted structural principles.

Whether understood or not, Stockhausen had become widely known and performed by the 1960s. His domineering personality and unwavering sense of historical purpose made him a divisive figure in new-music circles, particularly among Americans. But America at the time held a great attraction for the German composer, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and at UC Davis in 1966 and 1967.

The Bay Area, then becoming a hippy haven, had a new radicalizing effect on Stockhausen. While at Davis, he came up with new theories of intuitive music. Astrology and alternative lifestyles also proved appealing, although he apparently rejected drugs. About this time, Stockhausen began spending time in Tokyo as well, and elements of ceremonial ancient Japanese music entered his compositional vocabulary.

The late 1960s and early '70s brought a wide variety of masterpieces, with each major new work seeming to be a reinvention of music. These included "Mantra" for two pianos and electronics, "Stimmung" for a vocal ensemble singing in overtones and "Hymnen," a convoluted refashioning of national anthems for orchestra and tape.

More and more, unusual theater became part of his performances. "Sternklang," so-called star music, must be performed outdoors in a park setting at night. "Inori" is an orchestra piece that includes "adorations" for dancer-mimes. "Harlekin" is a solo for a dancing clarinetist.

Stockhausen's personal life took on a more theatrical flavor as well. In 1967, after the end of his first marriage, from which he had four children, he married Mary Bauermeister, a painter with whom he had two more children. By the late 1970s, when he had begun his huge operatic project, he was living in a specially designed house in Kurten on the outskirts of Cologne with two of his most trusted performers, flutist Kathinka Pasveer and clarinetist Suzanne Stephens, along with his children, many of whom became virtuoso performers.

They became the characters in his operas, an extraterrestrial, mythic, Christian saga that defies description. Meanwhile, Stockhausen became so involved with the epic struggle between good and evil he was producing that he seemed unable to separate his own ego from his creations.

And that got him in trouble when he infamously described the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center as the greatest artwork of all time. He immediately retracted the statement, saying he had been misunderstood since he meant that the destruction was the work of Lucifer, who just happened to be a figure in "Licht."

Although the first five operas were staged between 1981 and 1996 at La Scala in Milan, Italy, the Royal Opera in London and Leipzig Opera in Germany, Stockhausen was never able to get the final two produced. But he could be his own worst enemy by insisting on staging notions that made extraordinary music feel foolish.

Still, Stockhausen carried on. At the time of his death, he was busy creating "Klang," a new cycle of chamber works, one for each hour of the day. The 13th had its premiere in Rome in May. Although the composer's death, which was said to have followed a short illness, came as a surprise to the musical world, the fourth hour of "Klang" is called "Heaven's Door" and may well have been a premonition.

Premiered last year in Italy, the piece consists of "a percussionist knocking, battering, drumming, in 2 X 7 moods," Stockhausen's program notes read, "with wooden beaters on a heaven's door made of wood." Finally the door opens, and a terrifying noise erupts, leading to a wailing siren. A little girl from the audience walks onto the stage and through the door. The siren stops.

Funeral services have not been announced, but Stockhausen will be buried in Waldfriedhof (Forest Cemetery) in Kurten.

[7/4]

By the time he wrote "Sonntag" (Sunday) in 2003, Stockhausen had become a mystic. He was ridiculed for the prophetic cavorting of biblical characters and all manner of strange goings-on in the cycle. In "Freitag" (Friday), a typewriter copulates with a copying machine.

Sounds like a Naked Lunch moment. If Glass wrote operas likes this, maybe I'd like him better.

A literary high...

[CJ Shearn]

can't say I enjoyed his music but he was a definitive influence on electronic music, and even video game music as well.

[7/4]

http://www.myspace.com/stockhausenrip

[Tom Storer]

Stockhausen's son Marcus plays trumpet and records for ECM.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine sent me this quote from "The Rest is Noise" about Stockhausen:

"Henry Flynt (one of the downtown hipsters of the New York 60s scene) once picketed a 1964 Stockhausen concert as, by that time, the German avant-gardist was considered a reactionary, establishment figure. Flynt's slogan: 'STOCKHAUSEN - PATRICIAN THEORIST OF WHITE SUPREMACY: GO TO HELL.'".

Nothing like a bit of perspective, eh?