On December 5, the music world lost one of its biggest contributors of the last fifty years. A visionary composer, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen was one of the very first to understand the creative importance of electronic sound in 20th century contemporary music. He used electronics in his compositions often exceptionally and sometimes riskily: but he was always ahead of his time.

His ostensible influence on artists who have since cultivated the genre range from the oft-spotlighted Björk to the more-obscure-but-just-as-fascinating Coil; from minimalist composer Lamonte Yong’s conceptual application, to the troublemakers Stock, Hausen, and Walkman, whose sense of humor was tempered with much affection.So many of these artists have appreciated his talent for sonorous and musical research and investigation, as well as his personality, open and ready to tempt adventure. He challenged both the barriers of the genre and the ambient conformity of scholarly music, as is shown in his surprising piece Helikopter-Quartett, which he composed for a string quartet and four helicopters. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen will have passed his life as a composer who toed a perilous and exploratory line between written music, calculated in the smallest details; and his vibratory approach, almost ritual, to a sonorous material, brilliant and elusive like cosmic radiation. In this respect, his 1970 piece Für Kommende Zeiten rests one of his best manifestos. In it, Stockhausen inaugurated the notion of intuitive music within the composer. It was the first of his works to center around weather and planetary cycles, an interest that would nourish his works to come for the next 30 years (notably Sirius and Klang).

Photo extraite du site du festival italien: Dissonanze

Karl-Heinz Stockhausen earned his stripes in part in Paris, where he worked with Pierre Boulez and with the father of concrete music, Pierre Schaeffer. When he returned to Cologne, Germany, his works in the heart of the radio studio in the ghetto of the Rhineland would deliver several anthological pieces, like the well-named Kontakte, one of the first compositions to have confronted electronica and instrumentation at the end of the 50s. In the 60s, compositions like Gesang der Jünglinge and Hymnen attracted pop stars of the era like Frank Zappa or the Beatles, each as sensitive to the force of his music as to the quasi-mythic dimension of his personage. From then on, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s ambitious music blossomed in more popular musical scene. It is fairly easy in these conditions to find a certain connection between the cosmic considerations of this German composer and the advent of the “Kosmiche Musik” (better known as “krautrock”), later popularized by the musicians Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, two students of Stockausen at the heart of the Can group.

The path of his music and of his teaching opened a veritable plethora of tracks within the music scene, and the footprint of this creator on current exploratory music will be felt, without a doubt, for a long time yet.

Laurent Catala for Qwartz

translation: Simone Blaser