Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928 - 2007.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, who has died aged 79, was one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music. He was fond of quoting Blake's lines "He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity's sunrise"; and like Blake, the pursuit of his vision led him down strange, and often awkward paths. The results earned him a reverence among a cult following which is unique among 20th-century composers; but they also earned him a fair amount of ridicule....

Updated through 12/13.

The title of his most famous (and some would say best) piece, Gruppen, has a marvellous exuberance, in which fantasy and rigour feed off one another.

By this time Stockhausen had already become the acknowledged leader in what was then a fledgling medium; electronics. In the threadbare studio of the Paris Technical College he worked on a new dream: "I now wanted a structure, to be realised in an Etude, that was already worked into the micro-dimension of a single sound, so that in every moment, however small, the overall principle of my idea would be present."...

[I]t makes no sense to divide his career into a rationalist and a mystical phase; both were intertwined from the beginning, and they came together in the serial principle, to which Stockhausen, remained loyal to the end.

Ivan Hewett, the Guardian.

See also: Alex Ross has a press release from Stockhausen Verlag; the Wikipedia entry.

Update, 12/8: "Stockhausen had secured his place in music history by the time he was 30," writes Paul Griffiths in the New York Times. "He had taken a leading part in the development of electronic music, and his early instrumental compositions similarly struck out in new directions, in terms of their formal abstraction, rhythmic complexity and startling sound.... Mr Stockhausen produced an astonishing succession of compositions in the 1950s and early 60s: highly abstract works that were based on rigorous principles of ordering and combination but at the same time were vivid, bold and engaging.... By the 1960s his influence had reached rock musicians, and he was an international subject of acclaim and denigration."

Update, 12/9: "[T]he fact is: no Stockhausen, no Pink Floyd, no Stockhausen, no Velvet Underground or Yes, certainly no Brian Eno," writes Ed Vulliamy in the Observer. "Probably no Radiohead either. This was the man who realised that Wagner was rock'n'roll and that rock'n'roll is Wagner."

Update, 12/13: For the Guardian, Tom Service collects remembrances from friends and collaborators (including the Quays) and writes, "The one thing Stockhausen had more than any other composer of the 20th and 21st centuries was unshakeable self-belief. He was as sincere and single-minded in his adoption of Sirian cosmology in the 1980s and 90s as he was of serialism in the 50s."

Posted by dwhudson at December 7, 2007 10:44 AM