Karlheinz Stockhausen
Composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22, 1928, in Mödrath; died January 5, 2007, in Kürten-Kettenberg) is considered a pioneer of electronic and new music and one of the most important composers of the 20th century. The son of a teacher, he grew up in the strictly Catholic town of Altenberg. His father went missing in the war, his mother died in a sanatorium, and as a teenager he worked in a field hospital, but in 1947 he managed to graduate from school on his own and then began studying music, philosophy, and German language and literature in Cologne. In 1951, Stockhausen composed his first piece, Kreuzspiel, and met Herbert Eimert at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, who then persuaded him in 1953 to work at the Studio for Electronic Music at WDR in Cologne, where the composer took over as artistic director in 1963.
Darmstadt also inspired him to go to Paris to study with Olivier Messiaen, where, through his interactions with his teacher and young colleagues such as Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, he developed the idea of music that was strictly planned down to the last detail and structured in groups and series. Karlheinz Stockhausen achieved his breakthrough in public perception in 1956 with the collage-like, synthetic Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths), after having previously explored the spatial effect of tones, noises, and artificial sound generation with sine wave generators (Studien I/II, 1953/54). He then explored the limits of electronic music until the mid-1960s, taught at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, directed the Cologne Courses for New Music between 1963 and 1969, was invited to the universities of Basel, Philadelphia, and California, and was appointed professor at the Cologne University of Music in 1971.
With Telemusik (1966), Karlheinz Stockhausen expanded the forms of electronic and serial composition to include the idea of intuition, and soon after, through contact with Asian cultures, to include spirituality. Stockhausen presented his sound spaces at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, composed works such as Mantra for Two Pianists, and began his intellectual exploration of the seven-evening music theater cycle Licht (1977–2003), the realization of his vision of a Gesamtkunstwerk that could be planned down to the smallest detail of its staging. Over the decades, he composed more than 280 works. Karlheinz Stockhausen received numerous awards, from the Federal Cross of Merit (1974) to the Swedish Polar Prize (2001), and is considered an important inspiration for entire circles of artists, from Joseph Beuys to Kraftwerk to the DJs of the techno generation, who all drew on his work.