Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the 20th-century's most important and controversial composers, died on 5th December.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Before he died at his home in Kürten on Wednesday, Karlheinz Stockhausen was still the world's most influential composer. Others, Steve Reich perhaps, may be touchstone influences for as many individual musicians, but few could match the depth and range of Stockhausen's impact on musical thought. Consider just one example: before Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), electronic music was either made entirely from synthetic sounds, or entirely from manipulated recordings. Stockhausen was the first to combine the two, paving the way for the next 50 years of electronic music. Some people will tell you that as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956, the Hungarian composer György Ligeti was illegally listening to a West German broadcast of Gesang; within weeks he had fled his homeland and was sharing Stockhausen's flat and trying his hand in the electronic studio in Cologne where Gesang and several of Stockhausen's masterworks were conceived. Only John Cage, perhaps, can match Stockausen's lifelong obsession with the scrutiny and reinvention of every aspect of music -- rhythm, pitch, notation, instrumental technique, performance practice, theatrical presentation. With the establishment of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music in 1994, as well as his own recording label and publishing house, regular Stockhausen summer schools and a definitive documentary archive, his imagination extended into new ways of disseminating, distributing and teaching his music.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen's remarkable career gives the lie to the popular assumption that there is no audience for music that is tough, dissonant and challenging. The lasting success of his music across such a wide range of listeners turns this assumption on its head: it's music that isn't challenging enough that has difficulty finding an audience.



There were and remain plenty of detractors, and for a time 'Stockhausen' was a byword for avant-garde excess. He also courted ridicule and controversy with his statements on cosmology ("I have dreamt several times that I came from Sirius and that I was trained there as a musician") and 9/11 ("The greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos. Minds achieving in a single act what we in music can only dream of, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying. ... Against that, we - as composers - are nothing."). Yet this most audacious of all the postwar avant-gardists was one of very few to achieve wide admiration outside the new music circuit; it is even more remarkable that he achieved this with his most uncompromising music of the 1950s and 60s.

History will probably show that the extraordinary run of works from Kreuzspiel (1951) to Kontakte (1960) -- and including the first eleven Klavierstücke (1952-6), Zyklus (1959), and his masterpiece, Gruppen (1957) -- was his finest period, but there are important works all the way through. These include the 2-hour electronic anthem of world unity, Hymnen, and the ritualistic, erotic vocal meditation Stimmung, recently recorded by the Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices.



In 1977 Stockhausen devoted himself to composing the operatic heptalogy, Licht -- one immensely ambitious opera for each day of the week. It is very likely the biggest work of art ever conceived and completed by a single artist. He completed it 2003, aged 75, a superhuman effort. He crossed the line running, saving one of his most extraordinary conceptions until the end -- the final scene of the seventh opera, Sonntag, is performed in two different versions, simultaneously, in two different concert halls, with the sound of one broadcast into the other -- and if it started to seem as though he would never stop, his next project, Klang, only strengthened the sense of immortality: 24 pieces for the 24 hours of the day.



But Klang remains unfinished, only seven pieces completed. The common perception of Stockhausen's later years is that the quality of his music tailed off and became increasingly self-serving and irrelevant, even onanistic. The simple truth is that because of their outlandish theatrical demands, the Licht operas are rarely staged and only known to few; Stockhausen himself never saw the last two staged, and only tentative plans exist for a performance of the complete cycle in 2010. Those lucky enough to have seen them, however, speak of them very highly indeed. Only time will allow us to fully assess Stockhausen's contribution to music, but it seems his Sirian star will continue to rise.