Musicians - Karlheinz Stockhausen

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	Musicians - Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22 1928) is a composer.

Life and work

Born in Burg Mödrath, near Cologne (German: Köln), he studied at the Cologne Musikhochschule and University (1947-51), at Darmstadt in 1951, with Olivier Messiaen and for a short time with Darius Milhaud in Paris (1951-53). From 1954 to 1956, at the University of Bonn, he studied phonetics, acoustics, and information theory and composition. After lecturing at the contemporary music seminars at Darmstadt (1957), Stockhausen gave lectures and concerts in Europe and North America.

Stockhausen has worked with serial and electronic procedures, with spatial placements of sound sources (for example in his noted work Gesang der Jünglinge), and with graphical notation. Stockhausen sometimes departs radically from musical tradition and his work is influenced by Messiaen and Anton Webern. He claims that he explores fundamental psychological and acoustic aspects of music. Despite his interest in electronic music he gives performers a large role in determining certain parameters of a composition. In Zyklus for example, 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, or not, as the performer chooses.

In most of his works, elements are played off against one another, simultaneously and successively: in Kontrapunkte (1953) pairs of instruments and extremes of note values "confront" one another; in Gruppen (1955-7) fanfares and passages of varying speed (based on the harmonic series) are flung between three full orchestras, giving the impression of movement in space.

His Kontakte for electronic sounds, piano and percussion (1959/60) broached new horizons in the use of electronics in serious music, as did Mikrophonie I (1964) for tam-tam, two microphones, two filters with potentiometers (6 players) and Mikrophonie II (1965) for choir, Hammond organ, and four ring modulators.

Since Mantra (1970) Stockhausen has concentrated almost exclusively on formula composition, a compositional technique which involves the rotation and expansion of a single melody-formula, usually stated at the outset.

Stockhausen has written over 200 individual works. Since 1977 he has been engaged in composing a cycle of seven operas called Licht. The Licht cycle deals with the relationships between three characters; Lucifer, Michael and Eve. Stockhausen's conception of opera is based significantly on ceremony and ritual and his approach to characterisation shows the influence of Artaud in its rejection of psychological perspective. Similarly, his approach to voice and text suggests a change from the traditional emphasis: much of Licht is written in an invented language. In the early 1990s Stockhausen gained access to all the recordings of his music he had made to that point, and began his own record company to make this music permanently available on compact disc. He also designs and prints his own musical scores. The score for his piece Refrain, for instance, is a circular (refrain).

Stockhausen is one of the few major twentieth-century composers to write a large amount of music for the trumpet, inspired by his son Markus Stockhausen, a trumpeter.

The dream of flying has accompanied Karlheinz Stockhausen's career since the very beginning. Back in the early 1950s, when he was enthralling some and infuriating others in the avant-garde community around the Darmstadt Summer Courses in New Music with his first works Punkte, Kontrapunkte and Kreuzspiel he was already developing his first ideas for liberating musicians from the constraints of gravity. With his studio technicians he discussed ways of positioning instrumentalists on chairs that could be swung through the room on ropes.

This interest came to a head with the Helikopter-Streichquartett, completed in 1993. In this, the four members of a string quartet each perform from their own helicopter flying above 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. Pictures of the performers are also transmitted back to the concert hall. The performers are kept in synchronicity with the aid of a click-track. Despite its extremely unusual nature, the piece has been given several performances, including one on 22nd August 2003 as part of the Salzburg Festival to open the Hangar-7 venue. The work has also been recorded by the Arditti Quartet.

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