bigideas

Today German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died at the age of 79. In a half-century of revisionism in the classical music world, Stockhausen remained a joyful experimenter in sound whose infectious excitement seemed to make accessible the most superficially “difficult” of music.

Stockhausen’s influence wasn’t limited to the classical avant garde, and his music never seems academic or insular. In fact, although he’s been namechecked by many electronic musicians, he seems to be less often mentioned by contemporary classical composers. His sons Markus and Simon are at least as interested in jazz and electronica as they are in composing for orchestras. Although never omitted from the hagiographies of twentieth century composition, Stockhausen’s influence is perhaps, like Cage’s, felt more often outside his own discipline than within it.

The first proper piece of experimental music I ever heard was Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I, a piece performed on the surfaces of a pair of large gongs, using a variety of objects to attack them and using microphones and electronic filters to interfere with the sound. It’s a typical Stockhausen piece, in a way, although it’s a lot more “out there” than some of his other work (his music for clarinet can be particularly lyrical).

Yet it has a spirit of adventure and a sort of seriousness of purpose that somehow overcomes the weirdness of the idea. While I might have listened sceptically, thinking the whole thing was a daft idea, somehow it caught my imagination anyway. I still listen to it occasionally, although through hard experience I avoid playing it at dinner parties.

Rather than do the biography, which plenty of other obits will cover in the weekend papers, here are some YouTube clips in case you’ve no idea what I’m talking about.

Here’s one of Stockhausen’s most famous early pieces Kontakte, scored for piano, percussion and a tape of electronic music the composer created himself using very basic tools:

Something a bit more “melodic” (although not conventionally tuneful) — Pieta, for flugelhorn and electronics:

if you fancy something with more “traditional” instrumentation, Stockhausen wrote a sequence of piano pieces in the “pointilliste” style, in which each individual note seems disconnected from the others. Listening to these pieces seems to me like walking through a garden, glancing around at things, without worrying about what it’s all supposed to “mean”, because it isn’t supposed to “mean” anything:

Hope you enjoyed the clips. Stockhausen completed his seven-part opera Licht in 2003, and it will be played as intended — over the course of a week — in Dresden next year.