Karlheinz Stockhausen

German composer

• Born: August 22, 1928
• Birthplace: Mödrath, near Cologne, Germany
• Died: December 5, 2007
• Place of death: Kürten, Germany

Stockhausen’s innovative and influential compositions successfully bridged the gap between technology and creative endeavor and integrated a wide spectrum of musical and nonmusical concepts. In broad terms, he developed from an artist following intellectual models to one capable of a powerful synthesis of objective and subjective materials and processes.

Early Life

Karlheinz Stockhausen (KAHRL-hints STAWK-howz-ehn) was born in the village of Mödrath, near Cologne, in northwestern Germany. He was the first of three children born to Simon Stockhausen, a schoolteacher, and Gertrud Stockhausen. When Stockhausen was only four years old, his mother, who suffered from depression, entered a sanatorium. Soon after, his father was forced to become an active member of the Nazi Party because of his status as a teacher, and the young Stockhausen occasionally was pressed into service as a party messenger for his father.

Upon starting primary school in the village of Altenberg, Stockhausen began piano study with the organist of the village church. Since he was gifted musically and seemed also to have inherited from his father a capacity to learn, he soon was recommended for study at a secondary school in a nearby town. From here he progressed in 1941 to a teacher training college at Xanten, which was downstream on the Rhine River from his native region.

The college in Xanten proved to be somewhat harsh, as military rigor was imposed upon the students’ lives. Fortunately, music was not proscribed, and Stockhausen began lessons on the violin as well as the oboe, which he played in the college wind band. His earliest contact with jazz music also dates from his three years at Xanten. During these years, Stockhausen was cut off, for the most part, from communicating with his family. His father had entered the army, and in 1942 Stockhausen learned that his mother had been put to death under the terms of a government policy to create more space for military hospitalization.

Leaving Xanten in October, 1944, Stockhausen became a stretcher-bearer in a military hospital, where he came into contact with wounded and dying American and English soldiers as well as those of the German army. He saw his father for the last time shortly before the end of the war; Simon is believed to have died in service on the Hungarian front.

After the war, Stockhausen found work on a farm, and soon his evenings were occupied in assisting a local operetta society in preparing performances. Qualifying in February, 1946, for entrance as a senior student at a school in Bergisch Gladbach, he supported himself with miscellaneous musical jobs until his graduation the following year. Now nineteen years old, Stockhausen was enrolled in the four-year course of the State Academy of Music in Cologne and simultaneously took courses in musicology and philosophy at the University of Cologne. At the academy, his principal areas of study were piano and school music, but in 1950 he had several lessons in composition from the Swiss composer Frank Martin, who had joined the faculty at the academy. Several short works by Stockhausen survive from these years, including Chore f†r Doris (1950; chorus for Doris), for unaccompanied chorus, and Drei Lieder (1950; three songs), for alto voice and orchestra.

In his final year at the academy, Stockhausen was engaged largely in composing and in preparing his final examination thesis. In the middle of this demanding academic activity, the young musician continued to work nights as a jazz pianist in local bars.

In 1951, Stockhausen met the Cologne music critic Herbert Eimert, who was in charge of a series of evening broadcasts of contemporary music on North-West German Radio. Finding in the young composer both musical talent and a strong personality, Eimert arranged the first radio performance of a Stockhausen work and invited the composer to become a regular contributor to his program. Eimert also introduced Stockhausen to the Darmstadt New Music Courses, which in 1951 included a seminar by Eimert and others on music and technology. That same year at Darmstadt, French composer Pierre Schaeffer contributed a lecture-demonstration on the activities of a Paris group pursuing the concept of musique concrète, electronic music using manipulated tape-recorded sounds of the everyday, concrete world.

Following the Darmstadt course in the summer of 1951, Stockhausen returned to Cologne to prepare for state examinations to qualify as a secondary school music teacher. He passed with the exams with distinction. In November, he completed his first major composition, Kreuzspiel (crossplay), which he dedicated to Doris Andreae, also a student at the academy. On December 29, Stockhausen and Andreae were married (four children were born to the couple between 1953 and 1961), and in January, 1952, Stockhausen went to Paris for further study.

Life’s Work

In the early 1950’s, Parisian musical life, like that of many European centers, was dominated by the example of the composer Anton von Webern, whose radically distilled works were based upon the concept of “serialism.” Serialism, an evolution of developments initiated earlier in the century by Arnold Schoenberg, dictated that unity in musical composition was to be sought by rigorously and systematically interrelating musical elements such as pitch, harmony, rhythm, and instrumental tone-color. After Webern’s premature death, the serialist banner was carried into the postwar period by the influential French composer Olivier Messiaen , whose music Stockhausen heard at Darmstadt in 1951. Already influenced by Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949; mode of values and intensities), which Stockhausen likened to “star music,” the young German determined to attend Messiaen’s course in analysis and aesthetics during 1952-1953.

Paris offered more to Stockhausen than just the stimulus of Messiaen’s powerful musical thinking. He also worked with the musique concräte group, producing his first tape composition, Étude (1952; study), and he investigated the synthesis of sound spectra by the combination of pure sounds produced electronically, thus laying the foundation for his early electronic compositions. The best-known work of Stockhausen’s Parisian year is Kontra-Punkte (1952-1953; counterpoints), a composition of a type called pointillist. This term, loosely derived from the technique of painting in small dots of color, is intended to evoke the sense of the free distribution of notes across a continuum of pitch and time. Pointillist form was intended as a rejection of many of the compositional ideas of European music, such as theme, contrast, and rhythmic sequence. Accordingly, Stockhausen’s early compositions, like those of many of his contemporaries, were not well received by the general public, which had difficulty perceiving the constructive artistic intent behind the wholesale transformation of musical language.

In 1953, Stockhausen returned to Germany and became a collaborator at the studio for electronic music at West German Radio in Cologne, where he began work on Electronishe Studien I and II (1953, 1954; electronic studies), his first exclusively electronic compositions. The first of these is made up of combinations of pure sine-wave tones in fixed proportions; the second is derived from sine tones acoustically manipulated to create an element of indeterminate pitch, or “noise.” The second study is historically significant in that it was the first electronic composition to be published as a score, and it was one of the first to be brought out on record. Both compositions display a nearly total “serialization” of the process of composition, in which a set of rules determines the musical content. In works such as this, a blurring of distinctions between “form” and “material” is brought about that, in theory, might render the music wholly abstract and mechanical. However, Stockhausen’s inventiveness and his grasp of the psychology of perception allowed him to maintain the vividness of musical experience.

While at work on the second study, Stockhausen undertook further academic study under Werner Meyer-Eppler of the University of Bonn. Lecturing on communication theory and phonetics, Meyer-Eppler provided Stockhausen with new perspectives on the physical and structural potential of sound. The result of Stockhausen’s study can be heard in his Gesang der J†nglinde (1956; songs of the youths), which is widely regarded as one of the major early achievements of electronic music.

Stockhausen’s activities outside the realm of composition continued with his participation in the journal Die Reihe, which first appeared in 1955 under his joint editorship with Eimert, who had also founded the Cologne Electronic Studio. Still only in his late twenties, Stockhausen already was widely recognized as a leading figure in contemporary music, and the influence of this musical thinking had begun to spread. In 1953, he began collaborating in the International Vacation Courses for New Music program in Darmstadt, and in the 1960’s he was to lecture at universities in the United States, where his articulate and compelling exposition of his own work brought him to the attention of a widening audience.

The composition Zeitmasze (1956; tempi) began a new period of instrumental composition for Stockhausen. This dense, many-layered work, scored for flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, and bassoon, represents a reassessment of the pointillist style that had been the mainstay of European avant-garde music in the early 1950’s. Zeitmasze maintains the composer’s characteristic formal rigor while allowing the physical and psychological vitality of live musical performance to take on new importance. A fundamental conception of the work is that independently varying measures of time can be made to interact in a manner that necessitates a “distributive” and “statistical,” rather than a thematic and metrical, perception of musical material. To a degree, Zeitmasze represents the adaptation of abstract theory to an appreciation of the perception of music; its jazz-like flux of instrumental sound-events lends it a quality distinct from intellectualized, conventional serialism.

In the late 1950’s, Stockhausen sought out new avenues of musical organization that often led to larger-scale works, though piano composition remained an important element in his overall development. Gruppen (1957; groups), employing three spatially separated orchestras directed by three conductors, signals a shift toward what has been called “group form,” in which sound events can be resolved into identifiable microstructures with collective properties capable of either logical or imaginative organization. Gruppen seems to embody musical analogues of natural phenomena, and the composer likened audible structures in this work to the outlines of mountains he observed in Switzerland during the work’s composition.

Stockhausen’s increasing confidence in composing large-scale works is shown by Carré (1960; square), written for four orchestras and four choirs; Kontakte (1960; contacts), for electronic sounds, piano, and percussion; and Momente (1964; moments), for solo soprano, four choral groups, and thirteen instrumentalists. The composer wrote that Carré arose out of a new experience of time gained while flying for hours at a time on tour in the United States. With his ear to the window, Stockhausen studied the vibrations coming from the engines of the propeller-driven airplanes and later composed the work as an exploration of fluctuations of continuous sounds. A notable development of Kontakte is the “contact” and interaction of electronic and instrumental sounds. As in Carré, the distribution of sound in space is a cardinal feature of the work.

In many of the compositions of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Stockhausen considered the problem of audience involvement in the often sterile concert environment of modern music. Surrounding an audience with moving sound, as in Carré, was a technical and aesthetic venture of great consequence, but he explored other ways of breaking down barriers between composer, performer, and audience. Momente, a work ultimately of some popularity, goes to the extreme of providing instructions to the choir to supply some of the heckling often associated with performances of contemporary music. Characteristically, however, this somewhat ironic gesture fits seamlessly into the purely musical fabric of the composition.

Momente embodies in its title one of Stockhausen’s most important aesthetic principles, that of “moment form.” Although distinctions between pointillist form, group form, and moment form are often difficult, the composer’s own explanation is that each moment is an individual and self-regulated state or process that neither depends on a previous musical form nor dictates a subsequent one but has an integrity in the present transcending the everyday experience of sequential time. Moment form is clearly a concept with a philosophical as well as a technical grounding, and it was foundational to most of Stockhausen’s later work.

Stockhausen was as unceasingly productive in the 1960’s as in the previous decade. One of the most significant developments of these years was his turning toward Asian culture for inspiration. The year 1966 brought commissions from the national broadcasting corporation of Japan, including Telemusik. In 1970, he was commissioned by the West German government to produce a work for a spherical auditorium at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. During a period of 183 days, more than one million visitors heard the composer and his ensemble perform his compositions in an environment designed especially for them.

Increasingly, Stockhausen’s compositions have embraced intuition, performer interaction, and open forms of organization in an effort to refine the humanistic goals of his music. Hymnen (1967; hymns), a composition of electronic and concrete music, is a tapestry of electronically transformed national anthems that embodies, in a general way, a message of universal toleration and diversity. Stimmung , completed in 1968 (the composer notes that the title may be translated in various ways, including “spiritual harmony” in addition to the conventional “tuning”), is an appealing work in which precise, demanding vocal technique is used to create a meditative atmosphere.

In 1967, Stockhausen married painter Mary Bauermeister, with whom he had two children, but the marriage soon ended. In later years, the composer had close relationships with persons who were also important collaborators, including flutist Kathinka Pasveer. Simon Stockhausen, from Stockhausen’s marriage to Bauermeister, became a versatile composer and instrumentalist. Two of the composer’s children by his first wife also were involved in the composer’s artistic projects and forged musical careers apart from their father’s activities. Marcus Stockhausen became a talented trumpeter, and Majella Stockhausen became a pianist.

Stockhausen’s “intuitive music” reached its greatest intensity in the work entitled Aus den sieben Tagen (1968; from the seven days), which seems to embody the resolution of a spiritual crisis that the composer experienced in 1968. Aus den sieben Tagen is not composed in musical notation but exists instead as a set of fifteen texts written by Stockhausen that communicate states of mind and spiritual aspirations. These have titles such as “Right Duration,” “Intensity,” and “Set Sail for the Sun,” which essentially direct the performer toward his or her own musical and spiritual resources. When played by musicians attuned to its demands, Aus den sieben Tagen can result in improvisation of substance and beauty, but few performing artists have the courage to proceed on the instruction “Play in the Rhythm of the Universe,” as one of the pieces suggests.

In the following decades, Stockhausen continued his research and speculation in the structuring and presentation of music. From this period, Mantra (1970) is widely regarded as a masterpiece that unites technological sophistication and creative inspiration. Much of the composer’s work immediately following was on a smaller scale and had more specific objectives than his work of the 1960’s, but in 1977 he began an ambitious series of compositions that would continue to occupy him for a quarter century. This is a cycle of music-dramas titled Licht (light). Completed in 2003, Licht comprises seven components, each named for a day of the week. The first section of the work to be completed was Donnerstag aus Licht (Thursday from light); it was composed between 1978 and 1980 and was first performed at La Scala in Milan, Italy, in 1981. The next two years were taken up with the composition of Samstag aus Licht (Saturday from light), which was produced with Stockhausen’s active participation in 1984 by the La Scala organization at a sports stadium in Milan.

The seven components of Licht vary greatly in their structure and musical materials, but each is intended as an elaboration of a thematic program dealing with three principal “characters” who are identified as Michael, Eva, and Luzifer. These figures are not so much narrative representations as archetypes possessing varying physical characteristics and participating in complex sexual and spiritual relationships.

At a news conference in Hamburg, Germany, on September 19, 2001, eight days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in were chosen and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Stockhausen had an urgent need to refer to Luzifer’s (Lucifer’s) “cosmic spirit of rebellion, of anarchy,” in an attempt to defuse the controversy ignited by a statement he had made three days earlier concerning the violent spectacle of the attacks. As quoted by the German newspaper Die Zeit, Stockhausen had remarked that the attacks had constituted “the greatest possible work of art in the entire cosmos.” Stockhausen was widely excoriated for these words in the following days and weeks, and notwithstanding his attempt to offer a benign interpretation of his remarks by reference to the quasi-philosophical program of Licht, cancellation of several scheduled performances of his works ensued. While it is clear that Stockhausen did not intend his September 16 remarks to constitute an endorsement of violence or terrorism, even those who maintained that he was speaking ironically or metaphorically were deeply dismayed by the tactlessness of his words and his seeming obliviousness to the inferences that might be drawn from them. Some critics who already had asserted that Stockhausen had lost touch with the contemporary world added ethical concerns to their reservations about his artistic and philosophical directions.

Although there is no consensus among scholars and critics about Stockhausen’s Licht in its entirety, both Samstag and Sonntag (the last of the series to be completed and performed) are sometimes identified as individually the most cohesive and musically appealing as stage productions. Also, most of the works feature sections, sometimes of substantial length, that can be performed independently of their role in the operas. A notable example of this is a “scene” from Mittwoch (Wednesday from light) entitled Helikopter-Streichquartett (helicopter string quartet). Stockhausen later said that the idea for the work came to him in a dream in which four musicians, each in an airborne helicopter, with all participants electronically linked, played their instruments in a manner that merged the sounds of the instruments with the mechanical sounds of the aircraft.

Stockhausen died December 5, 2007, in Kürten, Germany. He was seventy-nine years old.

Significance

Stockhausen’s compositional output was remarkable by any measure of creative endeavor, and, though questions of quality in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century musical culture are as difficult to formulate as they are to answer, the status of many of his works is unquestioned with respect to musical integrity, inventiveness, and influence. A true burden of creative innovation in music after World War II fell on relatively few shoulders. Among Stockhausen’s contemporaries perhaps only his French colleague Pierre Boulez bears comparison with him in these terms.

The complex evolution of Stockhausen’s music encompassed the analysis and electronic creation of sounds, the electronic shaping of musical material and its integration into the more familiar world of live musical performance, the reshaping of the concept as well as the experience of time in music, and the revision of the relation of the composer to performer and audience. In broad terms he developed from an artist following intellectual models to one capable of a powerful synthesis of objective and subjective materials and processes.

An appearance of calculated impersonality noted in Stockhausen’s earlier career by some critics yielded to a willingness to engage openly with issues of deep significance, and in his advocacy of personal and social transformation he sometimes seemed to be an elder statesman of pluralist, humanist culture. Without question, Stockhausen’s attempt to restore the image of the artist as a visionary figure met with notable successes based on innovative and uncompromising musical practices.

Bibliography

Brindle, Reginald Smith. The New Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. This survey, in which Stockhausen figures prominently, draws refreshing distinctions between the claims made by composers for their music and its actual expressive achievements. The author, also a composer, treats technical matters with clarity and common sense.

Harvey, Jonathan. The Music of Stockhausen. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. This book presents Stockhausen’s work with insight but with only intermittent sympathy for the nontechnical reader. Features also an attractive design.

Heikinheimo, Seppo. The Electronic Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen: Studies on the Esthetical and Formal Problems of Its First Phase. Helsinki, Finland: Suomen Musiikkitieteellinen Seura, 1972. Although this is a highly technical examination of a narrow range of the composer’s works, many of the central issues in Stockhausen’s earlier music are lucidly presented. The translation from Finnish is excellent.

Kurtz, Michael. Stockhausen: A Biography. Translated by Richard Toop. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1992. Published originally in German in 1988, this highly readable biographical account of the composer also offers photographs and illustrations that illuminate earlier phases of his life, with less attention to in-depth analysis of works.

Maconie, Robin. Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2005. Maconie’s encyclopedic knowledge of Stockhausen’s music is complemented in this volume by judicious and frequently entertaining reference to a spectrum of cultural issues spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A demanding book aimed at those with access to his recordings, but it can be read in fragments by those new to the composer’s works.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz. Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer. Interview by Jonathan Cott. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. The author, a poet and veteran journalist, elicits a colorful response from Stockhausen, an almost ideal interview subject. This book is one of the best documents of the postwar musical avant-garde.

Stuckenschmidt, H. H. Germany and Central Europe. Vol. 2 in Twentieth Century Composers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. Stuckenschmidt here devotes a reliable chapter of his survey to Stockhausen’s career to about 1963, but he is unable to convey the complexity of the composer’s work because of limitations of space. A sense of Stockhausen’s status as a German cultural figure may be gained by comparing him with other composers represented.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Twentieth Century Music. Translated by Richard Deveson. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. This excellent survey of the field has a particular value in detailing the thought of the Russian-born musicologist Joseph Schillinger, whose advanced theories on the relation between mathematics and music seem to have greatly influenced Stockhausen.

Tannenbaum, Mya. Conversations with Stockhausen. Translated by David Butchart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Consisting of texts of interviews conducted from 1979 to 1981, this is an often amusing look at both the mundane and exalted concerns of the composer as he struggles to arrange performances of his opera Donnerstag aus Licht.

Wörner, Karl Heinrich. Stockhausen: Life and Work. Translated and edited by Bill Hopkins. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. This book consists of a 1963 German text that was updated by the author in the late 1960’s, combined with descriptions by Stockhausen of most of his early works. The book is a mine of information but is loosely organized.