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Published on: 10/22/2005
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Stockhausen was born in the Burg (Castle) of the village of Mödrath, at the time serving as the maternity home of the Bergheim Kreis. (The village, located near Kerpen in the vicinity of Cologne, was dislocated in 1956 by the strip-mining of lignite in the region, though the Burg itself still exists).He grew up from the age of 7 in Altenberg, where he received his first piano lessons from the Protestant organist of the Altenberg Cathedral, Franz-Josef Kloth (Kurtz 1992, [p.?]).He studied music pedagogy and piano at the Cologne Musikhochschule, and musicology, philosophy, and Germanics at the University of Cologne (1947-51).
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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 National Conservatory of Music, Cologne, in 1971, where he taught until 1977.
In 1961 he 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, designed to his specifications by the architect Erich Schneider-Wessling, where he has resided since its completion in the autumn of 1965.In 1998, he founded the Stockhausen Courses, held annually in Kürten.
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Stockhausen has written over 300 individual works.He often departs radically from musical tradition and his work is influenced by Messiaen, Edgard Varèse, and Anton Webern, as well as by film (Stockhausen 1996) and by painters such as Mondrian and Klee.
1950s
Stockhausen began to compose in earnest only during his third year at the conservatory.He has published only four of his early student compositions, Chöre für Doris, Drei Lieder for alto voice and chamber orchestra, Chorale for a capella choir (all three from 1950), and a Sonatina for Violin and Piano (1951).
Starting from just after his first Darmstadt visit in 1951, Stockhausen began working with a form of athematic serial composition that rejected the twelve-tone technique of Schoenberg.He characterizes many of these earliest compositions (together with the music of other, like-minded composers of the period) as punktuelle ("punctual" or "pointist" music, commonly mistranslated as "pointillist") Musik, though one critic concluded after analysing several of these early works that Stockhausen "never really composed punctually" (Sabbe 1981).Compositions from this phase include Kreuzspiel (1951), the Klavierstücke I-IV (1952â€"the fourth is specifically cited by Stockhausen as an example of "punctual music"), and the first (unpublished) versions of Punkte and Kontra-Punkte (1952).
Starting in 1953, he turned to electronic music, first producing two Electronic Studies (1953 and 1954), and then introducing spatial placements of sound sources with his noted work Gesang der Jünglinge (1955-56).His position as the leading composer of his generation was established with this work and three concurrently composed pieces in different media: Zeitmasze for five woodwinds, Gruppen for three orchestras, and Klavierstück XI.
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 calls 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 graphical 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 calls 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 (1955-7) 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 1962 Stockhausen returned to the composition of vocal music (for the first time since Gesang der Jünglinge), with an expansive cantata titled Momente (1962-64/69), for solo soprano, four choir groups and thirteen instrumentalists.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), and composed two electronic works for tape, Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966-67).The latter also exists in a version with 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 (Stockhausen, "Weltmusik" in Texte 4, 468-76; English trans. online at [1]).
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Through the 1960s, Stockhausen explored the possibilities of "process composition" in works for live performance, such as Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968), culminating in the verbally described "intuitive music" compositions of Aus den sieben Tagen (1968), Für kommende Zeiten (1968-70), and Ylem (1972).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.
1970s
Beginning with Mantra (1970), Stockhausen turned to formula composition, a technique which involves the projection and multiplication of a single melody, double- or triple-line formula, sometimes stated at the outset as an introduction (Mantra, Inori).He continued to use this technique through the completion of the opera-cycle Licht in 2003.Some works from the 1970s did not employ formula technique, but nevertheless share its simpler, melodically oriented style.Tierkreis ("Zodiac", 1974-75) and In Freundschaft ("In Friendship", 1977) are amongst these, and 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 (Andraschke 1981).The best-known of these composers is Wolfgang Rihm, who studied with Stockhausen in 1972-73, and in his orchestral composition Sub-Kontur (1974-75) quoted the formula of Stockhausen's Inori (1973-74).
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Since completing Licht, Stockhausen has embarked on a new cycle of compositions, based on the hours of the day, titled Klang ("Sound").The works from this cycle performed to date are First Hour: Himmelfahrt (Ascension), for organ or synthesizer, soprano and tenor (2004-5); Second Hour: Freude (Joy) for two harps (2005); Third Hour: Natürliche Dauern (Natural Durations) for piano (2005-6); and Fourth Hour: Himmels-Tür (Heaven's Door) for a percussionist and a little girl (2005).The Fifth Hour, Harmonien (Harmonies) is for flute, bass clarinet, and trumpet (2006); the flute and bass clarinet solos from this piece will be premièred in Kürten in July 2007.The Sixth Hour, Cosmic Pulses, an electronic work, is to be premiered in Rome on 7 May 2007.
In the early 1990s Stockhausen reacquired the licenses to most of 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, which often involve unconventional devices.The score for his piece Refrain, for instance, includes a rotatable (refrain) on a transparent plastic strip, and dynamics in Weltparlament (the first scene of Mittwoch aus Licht) are coded in colour.
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 1950
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