49 Facts About Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was educated at the Hochschule fur Musik Koln and the University of Cologne, later studying with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's works, composed over a period of nearly sixty years, eschew traditional forms.

Karlheinz Stockhausen received numerous prizes and distinctions for his compositions, recordings, and for the scores produced by his publishing company.

Karlheinz Stockhausen died of sudden heart failure at the age of 79, on 5 December 2007 at his home in Kurten, Germany.

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Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in Burg Modrath, the "castle" of the village of Modrath.

In 2017, an anonymous patron purchased the house and opened it in April 2017 as an exhibition space for modern art, with the first floor to be used as the permanent home of the museum of the WDR Electronic Music Studio, where Karlheinz Stockhausen had worked from 1953 until shortly before WDR closed the studio in 2000.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's father, Simon Stockhausen, was a schoolteacher, and his mother Gertrud was the daughter of a prosperous family of farmers in Neurath in the Cologne Bight.

Karlheinz Stockhausen dramatized his mother's death in hospital by lethal injection, in Act 1 scene 2 of the opera Donnerstag aus Licht.

In late 1944, Karlheinz Stockhausen was conscripted to serve as a stretcher bearer in Bedburg.

From 1947 to 1951, Karlheinz Stockhausen studied music pedagogy and piano at the Hochschule fur Musik Koln and musicology, philosophy, and German studies at the University of Cologne.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was admitted at the end of that year to the class of Swiss composer Frank Martin, who had just begun a seven-year tenure in Cologne.

At the Darmstadter Ferienkurse in 1951, Karlheinz Stockhausen met Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts, who had just completed studies with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud (composition) in Paris, and Karlheinz Stockhausen resolved to do likewise.

Karlheinz Stockhausen arrived in Paris on 8 January 1952 and began attending Messiaen's courses in aesthetics and analysis, as well as Milhaud's composition classes.

Karlheinz Stockhausen continued with Messiaen for a year, but he was disappointed with Milhaud and abandoned his lessons after a few weeks.

Four of Karlheinz Stockhausen's children became professional musicians, and he composed some of his works specifically for them.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's daughter Christel is a flautist who performed and gave a course on interpretation of Tierkreis in 1977, later published as an article.

In 1961, Karlheinz Stockhausen acquired a parcel of land in the vicinity of Kurten, a village east of Cologne, near Bergisch Gladbach in the Bergisches Land.

Karlheinz Stockhausen had a house built there, which was designed to his specifications by the architect Erich Schneider-Wessling, and he resided there from its completion in the autumn of 1965.

Karlheinz Stockhausen founded and directed the Cologne Courses for New Music from 1963 to 1968, and was appointed Professor of Composition at the Hochschule fur Musik Koln in 1971, where he taught until 1977.

Karlheinz Stockhausen died of sudden heart failure on the morning of 5 December 2007 in Kurten, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Karlheinz Stockhausen often departs radically from musical tradition and his work is influenced by Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varese, and Anton Webern, as well as by film and by painters such as Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.

Karlheinz Stockhausen began to compose in earnest only during his third year at the conservatory.

Karlheinz Stockhausen characterized many of these earliest compositions as punktuelle Musik, "punctual" or "pointist" music, commonly mistranslated as "pointillist", though one critic concluded after analysing several of these early works that Stockhausen "never really composed punctually".

However, several works from these same years show Karlheinz Stockhausen formulating his "first really ground-breaking contribution to the theory and, above all, practice of composition", that of "group composition", found in Karlheinz Stockhausen's works as early as 1952 and continuing throughout his compositional career.

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In 1960, Karlheinz Stockhausen returned to the composition of vocal music with Carre for four orchestras and four choirs.

In 1963, Karlheinz Stockhausen created Plus-Minus, "2 × 7 pages for realisation" containing basic note materials and a complex system of transformations to which those materials are to be subjected in order to produce an unlimited number of different compositions.

Several of these process compositions were featured in the all-day programmes presented at Expo 70, for which Karlheinz Stockhausen composed two more similar pieces, Pole for two players, and Expo for three.

Karlheinz Stockhausen pioneered live electronics in Mixtur for orchestra and electronics, Mikrophonie I (1964) for tam-tam, two microphones, two filters with potentiometers (6 players), Mikrophonie II (1965) for choir, Hammond organ, and four ring modulators, and Solo for a melody instrument with feedback (1966).

At this time, Karlheinz Stockhausen began to incorporate pre-existent music from world traditions into his compositions.

In 1968, the West German government invited Karlheinz Stockhausen to collaborate on the German Pavilion at the 1970 World Fair in Osaka and to create a joint multimedia project for it with artist Otto Piene.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's works were performed for 5½ hours every day over a period of 183 days to a total audience of about a million listeners.

Between 1977 and 2003, Karlheinz Stockhausen composed seven operas in a cycle titled Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche.

In 1968, at the time of the composition of Aus den sieben Tagen, Karlheinz Stockhausen had read a biography by Satprem about the Bengali guru Sri Aurobindo, and subsequently he read many of the published writings by Aurobindo himself.

Karlheinz Stockhausen had dreams of flying throughout his life, and these dreams are reflected in the Helikopter-Streichquartett, completed in 1993.

In 1999, BBC producer Rodney Wilson asked Karlheinz Stockhausen to collaborate with Stephen and Timothy Quay on a film for the fourth series of Sound on Film International.

Karlheinz Stockhausen adapted 21 minutes of material taken from his electronic music for Freitag aus Licht, calling the result Zwei Paare, and the Brothers Quay created their animated film, which they titled In Absentia, based only on their reactions to the music and the simple suggestion that a window might be an idea to use.

When, at a preview screening, Karlheinz Stockhausen saw the film, which shows a madwoman writing letters from a bleak asylum cell, he was moved to tears.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's collected writings were published in Texte zur Musik, including his compositional theories and analyses on music as a general phenomenon.

Karlheinz Stockhausen has been described as "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music".

French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez once declared, "Karlheinz Stockhausen is the greatest living composer, and the only one whom I recognize as my peer".

Karlheinz Stockhausen was profoundly affected by what he heard and his music suddenly changed into "a far more discontinuous and disjunct style, involving elements of strict organization in all parameters, some degree of aleatoricism and controlled improvisation, together with an interest in collage from other musics".

San Francisco psychedelic groups Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead are said to have done the same; Karlheinz Stockhausen said that the Grateful Dead were "well orientated toward new music".

French writer Michel Butor acknowledges that Karlheinz Stockhausen's music "taught me a lot", mentioning in particular the electronic works Gesang der Junglinge and Hymnen.

Later in his life, Karlheinz Stockhausen was portrayed by at least one journalist, John O'Mahony of the Guardian newspaper, as an eccentric, for example being alleged to live an effectively polygamous lifestyle with two women, to whom O'Mahony referred as his "wives", while at the same time stating he was not married to either of them.

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Karlheinz Stockhausen made suggestions to each and they were then invited to respond.

Robin Maconie finds that, "Compared to the work of his contemporaries, Karlheinz Stockhausen's music has a depth and rational integrity that is quite outstanding.

Karlheinz Stockhausen replied, "I pray daily to Michael, but not to Lucifer.

Karlheinz Stockhausen uses his high degree of intelligence to destroy creation.