German composer, a major figure of electronic music and the 20th-century avant-garde. A pioneer of serial and then electroacoustic music, he profoundly renewed musical language after 1945.
Karlheinz Stockhausen(1928 — 2007)
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Allemagne
6 min read
Frequently asked questions
Key Facts
- Born in 1928 near Cologne, died in 2007
- Composed Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) in 1955-1956, a founding work of electroacoustic music
- A central figure at the Darmstadt summer courses, a hub of the European musical avant-garde
- Worked at the electronic music studio of Cologne radio (WDR) from 1953
- Created the monumental opera cycle Licht (Light), composed between 1977 and 2003
Works & Achievements
An early work applying integral serialism, which brought him to attention at Darmstadt.
Blending a child's voice with electronic sounds, it is regarded as a founding work of electroacoustic music.
For three orchestras surrounding the audience, a masterpiece of spatialized sound.
A major work setting electronic sounds in dialogue with instruments, exploring the transformation of sound.
For six voices sustaining and coloring a single chord, a pioneering work of repetitive and meditative music.
A collection of "intuitive music" in which short texts replace the score.
For two pianos and electronics, built on a melodic formula developed from one end of the work to the other.
A cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week, a monumental project spanning the entire final phase of his life.
Anecdotes
In 1956, Stockhausen composed the *Gesang der Jünglinge*, a work in which he mixed a recorded child's voice with electronic sounds for the first time. The result was so new that it is often considered the first major work of electroacoustic music in history.
Stockhausen was fascinated by space: for *Gruppen* (1958), he positioned three orchestras around the audience so that the sound literally travelled from one side of the hall to the other. At the World's Fair in Osaka in 1970, he had a spherical auditorium built in which the music swirled all around the spectators.
Stockhausen's portrait appears on the famous cover of the Beatles' album *Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band* (1967), proof of his influence on the pop musicians of his time. Bands like Pink Floyd and artists like Björk have claimed his legacy.
Starting in 1977, Stockhausen devoted nearly 26 years to a gigantic cycle of operas titled *Licht* (Light), with one opera for each day of the week. One of its most famous scenes, the *Helikopter-Streichquartett*, asks four musicians to each play inside a helicopter in flight, their sound being relayed back into the hall.
A child during the Second World War, Stockhausen lost both his parents and had to work as a stretcher-bearer in a military hospital. To earn a living as a student, he played piano in bars and was even the accompanist for a magician.
Primary Sources
In it, Stockhausen lays out his unified theory of musical time, arguing that pitch, duration, and rhythm are merely aspects of one and the same vibratory phenomenon perceived at different speeds.
A collection of Stockhausen's lectures and articles in which he comments on his own works and sets out his ideas on serialism, electronics, and intuitive music.
The pieces contain no notes but short poetic texts serving as instructions for the musicians, for example “Play a vibration in the rhythm of your body”.
Key Places
Birthplace of Stockhausen in 1928, into a modest family in the Rhineland.
Studio of the West German radio where Stockhausen created his first major electronic works from 1953 onward.
City of the Summer Courses for New Music, a hub of the avant-garde where Stockhausen trained and later taught.
Stockhausen briefly studied here with Olivier Messiaen and discovered musique concrète in the early 1950s.
Village where Stockhausen lived, worked, and died in 2007; there he founded a summer course and a publishing house for his works.
Typical Objects
Electronic device producing pure waves that Stockhausen layered to build entirely new timbres. It was the basic tool of the Cologne studio.
Magnetic tape recorder that allowed sounds to be cut, spliced and layered. Stockhausen edited his music by physically assembling pieces of tape.
A set of speakers arranged all around the audience to move sound through space. Stockhausen made it a central feature of his electronic concerts.
Notation made of symbols, diagrams or text rather than traditional notes, used to describe sounds impossible to write any other way. Stockhausen invented many forms of it.
Instrument for which Stockhausen composed his famous 'Klavierstücke' (Piano Pieces), true laboratories for his rhythmic and formal ideas.
Four helicopters in flight, each carrying a musician of a string quartet, with their sounds and the noise of the rotors relayed into the concert hall. A symbol of Stockhausen's spectacular imagination.
School Curriculum
Vocabulary & Tags
Key Vocabulary
Daily Life
Morning
Stockhausen rose with strict discipline and devoted his mornings to composition, often in silence and concentration. He jotted down his ideas, drew diagrams, and meticulously planned the structure of his works before writing a single note.
Afternoon
Afternoons might be spent in the electronic studio, manipulating tape recorders, generators, and loudspeakers to shape sounds. There he sometimes worked for weeks to obtain just a few minutes of music.
Evening
Evenings were devoted to rehearsals, concerts, or teaching his ideas to young musicians. He also loved to discuss philosophy, spirituality, and cosmology at length.
Food
Stockhausen led a sober and orderly life, attaching little importance to fine dining. In his poor postwar youth, food was long scarce, which made him frugal.
Clothing
He wore modern, neat clothes, sometimes colorful, reflecting his extraordinary personality. On stage and in public, he cultivated a singular air of the thinker and visionary.
Housing
Settled in Kürten, in the Rhineland countryside, he lived in a house designed for work, surrounded by calm and greenery. It was there that he composed, edited, and archived his entire body of work.
