Biography of Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen (born 22 August 1928 in Mödrath; died 5 December 2007 in Kürten) was a German composer. He was one of the defining figures of post-1945 new music. He became especially important for serial composition, electronic music, spatial sound, live electronics and large-scale music theatre. Works such as Gesang der Jünglinge, Gruppen, Kontakte and the opera cycle Licht made him internationally known.

Childhood, war and education

Stockhausen grew up in the Rhineland. His childhood was shaped by the Second World War and by family losses. After 1945 he first worked in various jobs and from 1947 studied music education and piano at the Cologne music academy. He also studied musicology, German literature and philosophy. In the early 1950s he came into contact with the Darmstadt Summer Courses, Olivier Messiaen and the European avant-garde.

Electronic music in Cologne

In 1953 Stockhausen began work at the Studio for Electronic Music of the NWDR, later WDR, in Cologne. There he created early electronic works in which sound was conceived not only through traditional instruments, but through generators, tape, voice and spatial arrangement. Gesang der Jünglinge, premiered on 30 May 1956, connected electronic sounds with a boy's voice and became a key work of electronic music.

Space, time and sound

Stockhausen was interested not only in which tones sound, but also in where and how they move in space. In Gruppen he placed three orchestras around the space; in Kontakte he connected electronic sounds with piano and percussion. His works examined time proportions, timbre, density, movement and the relationship between composition and performance. In doing so he changed expectations of what a concert can be.

Licht and late works

From 1977 to 2003 Stockhausen worked on the seven-part opera cycle Licht, which presents the days of the week as a large musical world. After Licht he began the cycle Klang, intended to shape the hours of a day in music; it remained unfinished. In these late works Stockhausen connected composition, ritual, stage, electronics and spiritual ideas. This side of his work was influential, but also controversial.

Farewell

Karlheinz Stockhausen died in Kürten on 5 December 2007. His biography stands for a radical expansion of musical thinking. He treated sound as material, space as a musical dimension and technology as part of composition. For that reason his work remains challenging: it calls for precise listening, not quick admiration.