Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance ( aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.

He was educated at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the University of Cologne, later studying with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. One of the leading figures of the Darmstadt School, his compositions and theories were and remain widely influential, not only on composers of art music, but also on jazz and popular music. His works, composed over a period of nearly sixty years, eschew traditional forms. In addition to electronic music—both with and without live performers—they range from miniatures for musical boxes through works for solo instruments, songs, chamber music, choral and orchestral music, to a cycle of seven full-length operas. His theoretical and other writings comprise ten large volumes. He received numerous prizes and distinctions for his compositions, recordings, and for the scores produced by his publishing company.

His notable compositions include the series of nineteen '' Klavierstücke'' (Piano Pieces), ''Kontra-Punkte'' for ten instruments, the electronic/ musique-concrète ''Gesang der Jünglinge'', ''Gruppen'' for three orchestras, the percussion solo ''Zyklus'', ''Kontakte'', the cantata ''Momente'', the live-electronic '' Mikrophonie I'', ''Hymnen'', ''Stimmung'' for six vocalists, ''Aus den sieben Tagen'', ''Mantra'' for two pianos and electronics, '' Tierkreis'', '' Inori'' for soloists and orchestra, and the gigantic opera cycle ''Licht''.

He died of sudden heart failure at the age of 79, on 5 December 2007 at his home in Kürten, Germany.

Biography

Childhood

Stockhausen was born in Burg Mödrath, the "castle" of the village of Mödrath. The village, located near Kerpen in the Cologne region, was displaced in 1956 to make way for lignite strip mining, but the castle itself still stands. Despite its name, the building is more a manor house than a castle. Built in 1830 by a local businessman named Arend, it was called by locals ''Burg Mödrath''. From 1925 to 1932 it was the maternity home of the Bergheim district, and after the war it served for a time as a shelter for war refugees. In 1950, the owners, the Düsseldorf chapter of the Knights of Malta, turned it into an orphanage, but it was subsequently returned to private ownership and became a private residence again. 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 Stockhausen had worked from 1953 until shortly before WDR closed the studio in 2000.

His father, Simon Stockhausen, was a schoolteacher, and his mother Gertrud (née Stupp) was the daughter of a prosperous family of farmers in Neurath in the Cologne Bight. A daughter, Katherina, was born the year after Karlheinz, and a second son, Hermann-Josef ("Hermännchen") followed in 1932. Gertrud played the piano and accompanied her own singing but, after three pregnancies in as many years, experienced a mental breakdown and was institutionalized in December 1932, followed a few months later by the death of her younger son, Hermann.

From the age of seven, Stockhausen lived in Altenberg, where he received his first piano lessons from the Protestant organist of the Altenberger Dom, Franz-Josef Kloth. In 1938 his father remarried. His new wife, Luzia, had been the family's housekeeper. The couple had two daughters. Because his relationship with his new stepmother was less than happy, in January 1942 Karlheinz became a boarder at the teachers' training college in Xanten, where he continued his piano training and also studied oboe and violin. In 1941 he learned that his mother had died, ostensibly from leukemia, although everyone at the same hospital had supposedly died of the same disease. It was generally understood that she had been a victim of the Nazi policy of killing " useless eaters". The official letter to the family falsely claimed she had died 16 June 1941, but recent research by Lisa Quernes, a student at the Landesmusikgymnasium in Montabaur, has determined that she was murdered in the gas chamber, along with 89 other people, at the Hadamar Killing Facility in Hesse-Nassau on 27 May 1941. Stockhausen dramatized his mother's death in hospital by lethal injection, in Act 1 scene 2 (" Mondeva") of the opera Donnerstag aus Licht.

In late 1944, Stockhausen was conscripted to serve as a stretcher bearer in Bedburg. In February 1945, he met his father for the last time in Altenberg. Simon, who was on leave from the front, told his son, "I'm not coming back. Look after things." By the end of the war, his father was regarded as missing in action, and may have been killed in Hungary. A comrade later reported to Karlheinz that he saw his father wounded in action. Fifty-five years after the fact, a journalist writing for the ''Guardian'' stated that Simon Stockhausen was killed in Hungary in 1945.

Education

From 1947 to 1951, Stockhausen studied music pedagogy and piano at the Hochschule für Musik Köln (Cologne Conservatory of Music) and musicology, philosophy, and German studies at the University of Cologne. He had training in harmony and counterpoint, the latter with Hermann Schroeder, but he did not develop a real interest in composition until 1950. He 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 Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1951, Stockhausen met Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts, who had just completed studies with Olivier Messiaen (analysis) and Darius Milhaud (composition) in Paris, and Stockhausen resolved to do likewise. He arrived in Paris on 8 January 1952 and began attending Messiaen's courses in aesthetics and analysis, as well as Milhaud's composition classes. He continued with Messiaen for a year, but he was disappointed with Milhaud and abandoned his lessons after a few weeks. In March 1953, he left Paris to take up a position as assistant to Herbert Eimert at the newly established Electronic Music Studio of Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) (from 1 January 1955, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, or WDR) in Cologne. In 1963, he succeeded Eimert as director of the studio. From 1954 to 1956, he studied phonetics, acoustics, and information theory with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. Together with Eimert, Stockhausen edited the journal ''Die Reihe'' from 1955 to 1962.

Career and adult life

Family and home

On 29 December 1951, in Hamburg, Stockhausen married Doris Andreae. Together they had four children: Suja (b. 1953), Christel (b. 1956), Markus (b. 1957), and Majella (b. 1961). They were divorced in 1965. On 3 April 1967, in San Francisco, he married Mary Bauermeister, with whom he had two children: Julika (b. 22 January 1966) and Simon (b. 1967). They were divorced in 1972.

Four of Stockhausen's children became professional musicians (Kurtz 1992, 202), and he composed some of his works specifically for them. A large number of pieces for the trumpet—from ''Sirius'' (1975–77) to the trumpet version of ''In Freundschaft'' (1997)—were composed for and premièred by his son Markus. Markus, at the age of 4 years, had performed the part of The Child in the Cologne première of ''Originale'', alternating performances with his sister Christel. ''Klavierstück XII'' and ''Klavierstück XIII'' (and their versions as scenes from the operas ''Donnerstag aus Licht'' and ''Samstag aus Licht'') were written for his daughter Majella, and were first performed by her at the ages of 16 and 20, respectively. The saxophone duet in the second act of ''Donnerstag aus Licht'', and a number of synthesizer parts in the ''Licht'' operas, including ''Klavierstück XV'' ("Synthi-Fou") from '' Dienstag'', were composed for his son Simon, who also assisted his father in the production of the electronic music from ''Freitag aus Licht''. His daughter Christel is a flautist who performed and gave a course on interpretation of ''Tierkreis'' in 1977, later published as an article.

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

Teaching

After lecturing at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt (first in 1953), Stockhausen gave lectures and concerts in Europe, North America, and Asia. He was guest professor of composition at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and at the University of California, Davis in 1966–67. He founded and directed the Cologne Courses for New Music from 1963 to 1968, and was appointed Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik Köln in 1971, where he taught until 1977. In 1998, he founded the Stockhausen Courses, which are held annually in Kürten.

Publishing activities

From the mid-1950s onward, Stockhausen designed (and in some cases arranged to have printed) his own musical scores for his publisher, Universal Edition, which often involved unconventional devices. The score for his piece ''Refrain'', for instance, includes a rotatable (refrain) on a transparent plastic strip. Early in the 1970s, he ended his agreement with Universal Edition and began publishing his own scores under the Stockhausen-Verlag imprint. This arrangement allowed him to extend his notational innovations (for example, dynamics in ''Weltparlament'' he_first_scene_of_''Mittwoch_aus_Licht''.html" ;"title="Mittwoch_aus_Licht.html" ;"title="he first scene of ''Mittwoch aus Licht">he first scene of ''Mittwoch aus Licht''">Mittwoch_aus_Licht.html" ;"title="he first scene of ''Mittwoch aus Licht">he first scene of ''Mittwoch aus Licht''are coded in colour) and resulted in eight German Music Publishers Society Awards between 1992 (''Luzifers Tanz'') and 2005 (''Hoch-Zeiten'', from ''Sonntag aus Licht''). The ''Momente'' score, published just before Stockhausen's death in 2007, won this prize for the ninth time.

In the early 1990s, Stockhausen reacquired the licenses to most of the recordings of his music he had made to that point, and started his own record company to make this music permanently available on Compact Disc.

Death

Stockhausen died of sudden heart failure on the morning of 5 December 2007 in Kürten, North Rhine-Westphalia. The night before, he had finished a recently commissioned work for performance by the Mozart Orchestra of Bologna. He was 79 years old.

Compositions

Stockhausen wrote 370 individual works. He often departs radically from musical tradition and his work is influenced by Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse, and Anton Webern, as well as by film and by painters such as Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.

1950s

Stockhausen began to compose in earnest only during his third year at the conservatory. His early student compositions remained out of the public eye until, in 1971, he published ''Chöre für Doris'', '' Drei Lieder'' for alto voice and chamber orchestra, ''Choral'' for a cappella choir (all three from 1950), and a Sonatine for violin and piano (1951).

In August 1951, just after his first Darmstadt visit, Stockhausen began working with a form of athematic serial composition that rejected the twelve-tone technique of Schoenberg. He characterized many of these earliest compositions (together with the music of other, like-minded composers of the period) 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". Compositions from this phase include ''Kreuzspiel'' (1951), the '' Klavierstücke I–IV'' (1952—the fourth of this first set of four ''Klavierstücke'', titled ''Klavierstück IV'', is specifically cited by Stockhausen as an example of "punctual music", and the first (unpublished) versions of ''Punkte'' and ''Kontra-Punkte'' (1952). However, several works from these same years show Stockhausen formulating his "first really ground-breaking contribution to the theory and, above all, practice of composition", that of "group composition", found in Stockhausen's works as early as 1952 and continuing throughout his compositional career. This principle was first publicly described by Stockhausen in a radio talk from December 1955, titled "Gruppenkomposition: '' Klavierstück I''".

In December 1952, he composed a ''Konkrete Etüde'', realized in Pierre Schaeffer's Paris musique concrète studio. In March 1953, he moved to the NWDR studio in Cologne and turned to electronic music with two '' Electronic Studies'' (1953 and 1954), and then introducing spatial placements of sound sources with his mixed ''concrète'' and electronic work ''Gesang der Jünglinge'' (1955–56). Experiences gained from the ''Studies'' made plain that it was an unacceptable oversimplification to regard timbres as stable entities. Reinforced by his studies with Meyer-Eppler, beginning in 1955, Stockhausen formulated new "statistical" criteria for composition, focussing attention on the aleatoric, directional tendencies of sound movement, "the change from one state to another, with or without returning motion, as opposed to a fixed state". Stockhausen later wrote, describing this period in his compositional work, "The first revolution occurred from 1952/53 as ''musique concrète'', ''electronic tape music'', and ''space music'', entailing composition with transformers, generators, modulators, magnetophones, etc; the integration of concrete and abstract (synthetic) sound possibilities (also all noises), and the controlled projection of sound in space". His position as "the leading German composer of his generation" was established with ''Gesang der Jünglinge'' and three concurrently composed pieces in different media: ''Zeitmaße'' for five woodwinds, ''Gruppen'' for three orchestras, and '' Klavierstück XI''. The principles underlying the latter three compositions are presented in Stockhausen's best-known theoretical article, "... wie die Zeit vergeht ..." ("... How Time Passes ..."), first published in 1957 in vol. 3 of ''Die Reihe''.

His work with electronic music and its utter fixity led him to explore modes of instrumental and vocal music in which performers' individual capabilities and the circumstances of a particular performance (e.g., hall acoustics) may determine certain aspects of a composition. He called this "variable form". In other cases, a work may be presented from a number of different perspectives. In ''Zyklus'' (1959), for example, he began using graphic notation for instrumental music. The score is written so that the performance can start on any page, and it may be read upside down, or from right to left, as the performer chooses. Still other works permit different routes through the constituent parts. Stockhausen called both of these possibilities "polyvalent form", which may be either open form (essentially incomplete, pointing beyond its frame), as with ''Klavierstück XI'' (1956), or "closed form" (complete and self-contained) as with ''Momente'' (1962–64/69).

In many of his works, elements are played off against one another, simultaneously and successively: in ''Kontra-Punkte'' ("Against Points", 1952–53), which, in its revised form became his official "opus 1", a process leading from an initial "point" texture of isolated notes toward a florid, ornamental ending is opposed by a tendency from diversity (six timbres, dynamics, and durations) toward uniformity (timbre of solo piano, a nearly constant soft dynamic, and fairly even durations). In ''Gruppen'' (1955–57), fanfares and passages of varying speed (superimposed durations based on the harmonic series) are occasionally flung between three full orchestras, giving the impression of movement in space.

In his ''Kontakte'' for electronic sounds (optionally with piano and percussion) (1958–60), he achieved for the first time an isomorphism of the four parameters of pitch, duration, dynamics, and timbre.

1960s

In 1960, Stockhausen returned to the composition of vocal music (for the first time since ''Gesang der Jünglinge'') with '' Carré'' for four orchestras and four choirs. Two years later, he began an expansive cantata titled ''Momente'' (1962–64/69), for solo soprano, four choir groups and thirteen instrumentalists. In 1963, 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. Through the rest of the 1960s, he continued to explore such possibilities of " process composition" in works for live performance, such as ''Prozession'' (1967), ''Kurzwellen'', and ''Spiral'' (1968) and ''Für kommende Zeiten'' (1968–70). Some of his later works, such as ''Ylem'' (1972) and the first three parts of '' Herbstmusik'' (1974), also fall under this rubric. Several of these process compositions were featured in the all-day programmes presented at Expo 70, for which Stockhausen composed two more similar pieces, ''Pole'' for two players, and ''Expo'' for three. In other compositions, such as ''Stop'' for orchestra (1965), '' Adieu'' for wind quintet (1966), and the ''Dr. K Sextett'', which was written in 1968–69 in honour of Alfred Kalmus of Universal Edition, he presented his performers with more restricted improvisational possibilities.

He pioneered live electronics in ''Mixtur'' (1964/67/2003) 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). Improvisation also plays a part in all of these works, but especially in ''Solo''. He also composed two electronic works for tape, ''Telemusik'' (1966) and ''Hymnen'' (1966–67). The latter also exists in a version with partially improvising soloists, and the third of its four "regions" in a version with orchestra. At this time, Stockhausen also began to incorporate pre-existent music from world traditions into his compositions. ''Telemusik'' was the first overt example of this trend.

In 1968, Stockhausen composed the vocal sextet ''Stimmung'', for the Collegium Vocale Köln, an hour-long work based entirely on the overtones of a low B-flat. In the following year, he created ''Fresco'' for four orchestral groups, a ''Wandelmusik'' ("foyer music") composition. This was intended to be played for about five hours in the foyers and grounds of the Beethovenhalle auditorium complex in Bonn, before, after, and during a group of (in part simultaneous) concerts of his music in the auditoriums of the facility. The overall project was given the title ''Musik für die Beethovenhalle''. This had precedents in two collective-composition seminar projects that Stockhausen gave at Darmstadt in 1967 and 1968: ''Ensemble'' and ''Musik für ein Haus'', and would have successors in the "park music" composition for five spatially separated groups, ''Sternklang'' ("Star Sounds") of 1971, the orchestral work ''Trans'', composed in the same year and the thirteen simultaneous "musical scenes for soloists and duets" titled ''Alphabet für Liège'' (1972).

Space music and Expo '70

Since the mid-1950s, Stockhausen had been developing concepts of spatialization in his works, not only in electronic music, such as the 5-channel ''Gesang der Jünglinge'' (1955–56) and ''Telemusik'' (1966), and 4-channel ''Kontakte'' (1958–60) and ''Hymnen'' (1966–67). Instrumental/vocal works like ''Gruppen'' for three orchestras (1955–57) and ''Carré'' for four orchestras and four choirs (1959–60) also exhibit this trait. In lectures such as "Music in Space" from 1958, he called for new kinds of concert halls to be built, "suited to the requirements of spatial music". His idea was In 1968, the West German government invited 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. Other collaborators on the project included the pavilion's architect, Fritz Bornemann, Fritz Winckel, director of the Electronic Music Studio at the Technical University of Berlin, and engineer Max Mengeringhausen. The pavilion theme was "gardens of music", in keeping with which Bornemann intended "planting" the exhibition halls beneath a broad lawn, with a connected auditorium "sprouting" above ground. Initially, Bornemann conceived this auditorium in the form of an amphitheatre, with a central orchestra podium and surrounding audience space. In the summer of 1968, Stockhausen met with Bornemann and persuaded him to change this conception to a spherical space with the audience in the centre, surrounded by loudspeaker groups in seven rings at different "latitudes" around the interior walls of the sphere.

Although Stockhausen and Piene's planned multimedia project, titled ''Hinab-Hinauf'', was developed in detail, the World Fair committee rejected their concept as too extravagant and instead asked Stockhausen to present daily five-hour programs of his music. 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. According to Stockhausen's biographer, Michael Kurtz, "Many visitors felt the spherical auditorium to be an oasis of calm amidst the general hubbub, and after a while it became one of the main attractions of Expo 1970".

1970s

Beginning with ''Mantra'' for two pianos and electronics (1970), Stockhausen turned to formula composition, a technique which involves the projection and multiplication of a single, double, or triple melodic-line formula. Sometimes, as in ''Mantra'' and the large orchestral composition with mime soloists, ''Inori'', the simple formula is stated at the outset as an introduction. He continued to use this technique (e.g., in the two related solo-clarinet pieces, ''Harlekin'' arlequinand ''Der kleine Harlekin'' he Little Harlequinof 1975, and the orchestral ''Jubiläum'' ubileeof 1977) through the completion of the opera-cycle ''Licht'' in 2003. Some works from the 1970s did not employ formula technique—e.g., the vocal duet " Am Himmel wandre ich" (In the Sky I am Walking, one of the 13 components of the multimedia ''Alphabet für Liège'', 1972, which Stockhausen developed in conversation with the British biophysicist and lecturer on mystical aspects of sound vibration Jill Purce), "Laub und Regen" (Leaves and Rain, from the theatre piece ''Herbstmusik'' (1974), the unaccompanied-clarinet composition '' Amour'', and the choral opera ''Atmen gibt das Leben'' (Breathing Gives Life, 1974/77)—but nevertheless share its simpler, melodically oriented style. Two such pieces, ''Tierkreis'' ("Zodiac", 1974–75) and ''In Freundschaft'' (In Friendship, 1977, a solo piece with versions for virtually every orchestral instrument), have become Stockhausen's most widely performed and recorded compositions.

This dramatic simplification of style provided a model for a new generation of German composers, loosely associated under the label ''neue Einfachheit'' or New Simplicity. The best-known of these composers is Wolfgang Rihm, who studied with Stockhausen in 1972–73. His orchestral composition ''Sub-Kontur'' (1974–75) quotes the formula of Stockhausen's ''Inori'' (1973–74), and he has also acknowledged the influence of ''Momente'' on this work.

Other large works by Stockhausen from this decade include the orchestral ''Trans'' (1971) and two music-theatre compositions utilizing the ''Tierkreis'' melodies: ''Musik im Bauch'' ("Music in the Belly") for six percussionists (1975), and the science-fiction "opera" ''Sirius'' (1975–77) for eight-channel electronic music with soprano, bass, trumpet, and bass clarinet, which has four different versions for the four seasons, each lasting over an hour and a half.

1977–2003

Between 1977 and 2003, Stockhausen composed seven operas in a cycle titled '' Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche'' ("Light: The Seven Days of the Week"). The ''Licht'' cycle deals with the traits associated in various historical traditions with each weekday (Monday = birth and fertility, Tuesday = conflict and war, Wednesday = reconciliation and cooperation, Thursday = traveling and learning, etc.) and with the relationships between three archetypal characters: Michael, Lucifer, and Eve. Each of these characters dominates one of the operas (''Donnerstag'' hursday ''Samstag'' aturday and ''Montag'' onday respectively), the three possible pairings are foregrounded in three others, and the equal combination of all three is featured in ''Mittwoch'' (Wednesday).

Stockhausen's conception of opera was based significantly on ceremony and ritual, with influence from the Japanese Noh theatre, as well as Judeo-Christian and Vedic traditions. In 1968, at the time of the composition of ''Aus den sieben Tagen'', Stockhausen had read a biography by Satprem about the Bengali guru Sri Aurobindo, and subsequently he also read many of the published writings by Aurobindo himself. The title of ''Licht'' owes something to Aurobindo's theory of "Agni" (the Hindu and Vedic fire deity), developed from two basic premises of nuclear physics; Stockhausen's definition of a formula and, especially, his conception of the ''Licht'' superformula, also owes a great deal to Sri Aurobindo's category of the "supramental". Similarly, his approach to voice and text sometimes departed from traditional usage: Characters were as likely to be portrayed by instrumentalists or dancers as by singers, and a few parts of ''Licht'' (e.g., ''Luzifers Traum'' from ''Samstag'', ''Welt-Parlament'' from ''Mittwoch'', ''Lichter-Wasser'' and ''Hoch-Zeiten'' from ''Sonntag'') use written or improvised texts in simulated or invented languages.

The seven operas were not composed in "weekday order" but rather starting (apart from ''Jahreslauf'' in 1977, which became the first act of ''Dienstag'') with the "solo" operas and working toward the more complex ones: ''Donnerstag'' (1978–80), ''Samstag'' (1981–83), ''Montag'' (1984–88), ''Dienstag'' (1977/1987–91), ''Freitag'' (1991–94), ''Mittwoch'' (1995–97), and finally ''Sonntag'' (1998–2003).

Stockhausen had dreams of flying throughout his life, and these dreams are reflected in the ''Helikopter-Streichquartett'' (the third scene of ''Mittwoch aus Licht''), completed in 1993. In it, the four members of a string quartet perform in four helicopters flying independent flight paths over the countryside near the concert hall. The sounds they play are mixed together with the sounds of the helicopters and played through speakers to the audience in the hall. Videos of the performers are also transmitted back to the concert hall. The performers are synchronized with the aid of a click track, transmitted to them and heard over headphones.

The first performance of the piece took place in Amsterdam on 26 June 1995, as part of the Holland Festival. Despite its extremely unusual nature, the piece has been given several performances, including one on 22 August 2003 as part of the Salzburg Festival to open the Hangar-7 venue, and the German première on 17 June 2007 in Braunschweig as part of the Stadt der Wissenschaft 2007 Festival. The work has also been recorded by the Arditti Quartet.

In 1999 he was invited by Walter Fink to be the ninth composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival.

In 1999, BBC
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