Karlheinz Stockhausen
1928–2007, GERMAN
A towering figure of the post-World War II avant-garde, Stockhausen was an uncompromising innovator over a period of more than 50 years. His music was as controversial as it was influential.
KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN
The innovative composer is pictured here in a recording studio in 1965, at the height of his career. By this time, his name had almost become a byword for musical modernity.
ON TECHNIQUE
Pioneer of electronic music
Stockhausen was particularly noted for his groundbreaking work in electronic music in the 1950s. At that time, there was a heated debate as to whether the future lay in the purely electronically synthesized sounds produced in the German studios, or musique concrète, electrically modified recorded sounds, favored by the French studios. In Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths, 1955–1956), Stockhausen found ways to integrate the techniques, combining electronically generated sounds with a recorded human voice and its electronic transformations, using multiple-channel recording to explore the spatial positioning of sound as an integral parameter of the music.
Stockhausen was born in Mödrath, near Cologne. His early childhood was marred by the fact that his mother was admitted into a psychiatric institution in 1932. Another tragedy befell the Stockhausen family that year, when Karlheinz’s younger brother, Hermann, died.
Matters did not improve when, in 1938, his father remarried. His new wife was the family’s former housekeeper, a situation that the 10-year-old Karlheinz found unbearable. Then, in 1941, his mother died. The official cause of death was given as leukemia, but it is probable that she had been gassed by the Nazis.
Continuing turmoil
In 1942, Stockhausen left home to attend college in Xanten, but his education was interrupted two years later when he was called up for military service. For the remainder of World War II, he was a stretcher-bearer—an experience that had a deep impact on the unhappy teenager. This was compounded when his father went missing in action, presumed dead, in 1945.
After the war, Stockhausen resumed studies, first at Cologne Conservatory, then at the University of Cologne. In 1952, he moved to Paris to study composition with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud, before returning to Cologne to work with Herbert Eimert in the electronic music studio of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk.
During the 1950s, Stockhausen developed a distinctive avant-garde approach to composition, which included a methodical, analytical reworking of the serialism invented by Schoenberg, to which he later introduced some elements of indeterminacy. He also explored sound’s position in space and electronic music (see box). As his reputation as a composer grew, he became a leading figure of the Darmstadt School, a group of avant-garde and experimental composers.
DONNERSTAG AUS LICHT
This is a cover of Stockhausen’s opera Donnerstag aus Licht (Thursday from Light), one of a cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week.
International fame
By the 1960s, Stockhausen had become virtually a household name, as he continued to experiment and to develop his highly unconventional compositional techniques, while also touring internationally, as both a performer and a teacher. His major project, a massive cycle of seven operas called Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche (Light: The Seven Days of the Week) was begun in 1977, and completed in 2003. It was followed by another cycle, Klang (Sound), which was based on the hours of the day.
Stockhausen was twice married, and twice divorced, and several of his six children have themselves become professional musicians, frequently collaborating in their father’s compositions. He died at his home in Kürten of a heart attack in 2007, aged 79.
STIMMUNG
Theatre of Voices ensemble are here performing Stockhausen’s Stimmung (Tuning, 1968) at Zankel Hall in New York in 2015. In this work, the performers recite erotic poems written by Stockhausen.