Karlheinz Stockhausen (German: [kaʁlˈhaɪnts ˈʃtɔkhaʊzn̩]; August 22, 1928 – December 5, 2007) was a German composer. Many critics consider him one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his important work in electronic music. He is sometimes called the "father of electronic music." He also introduced methods that use chance in music, called aleatory techniques, into a style called serial composition. He also explored ways to place sounds in different areas, called musical spatialization.

Stockhausen studied at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the University of Cologne. Later, he studied with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. As a leading figure of the Darmstadt School, his compositions and ideas have had a lasting influence on composers of art music, as well as on jazz and popular music. His works, created over nearly sixty years, avoid traditional musical forms. His music includes electronic music with and without live performers, short pieces for musical boxes, works for solo instruments, songs, chamber music, choral and orchestral music, and a cycle of seven full-length operas. His writings include ten large volumes. He received many awards for his compositions, recordings, and for the music published by his company.

Some of his notable works include a series of nineteen piano pieces called Klavierstücke, Kontra-Punkte for ten instruments, the electronic piece Gesang der Jünglinge, Gruppen for three orchestras, the percussion solo Zyklus, Kontakte, the cantata Momente, the live-electronic piece Mikrophonie I, Hymnen, Stimmung for six vocalists, Aus den sieben Tagen, Mantra for two pianos and electronics, Tierkreis, Inori for soloists and orchestra, and the large opera cycle Licht.

Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007, at the age of 79, at his home in Kürten, Germany.

Biography

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in Burg Mödrath, a manor house in the village of Mödrath. The village is near Kerpen in the Cologne region. In 1956, the village was moved to make space for coal mining, but the manor house still stands today. Though called a "castle," the building is actually a large home. It was built in 1830 by a local businessman named Arend. Locals called it Burg Mödrath. From 1925 to 1932, the building was a maternity home for the Bergheim district. After World War II, it was used as a shelter for people fleeing the war. In 1950, the Düsseldorf chapter of the Knights of Malta turned it into an orphanage. Later, it became a private home again. In 2017, an anonymous person bought the house and opened it as a modern art exhibition space. The first floor now houses the museum of the WDR Electronic Music Studio, where Stockhausen worked from 1953 until the studio closed in 2000.

Stockhausen’s father, Simon Stockhausen, was a schoolteacher. His mother, Gertrud (born Stupp), came from a family of farmers in Neurath, near Cologne. A daughter, Katherina, was born the year after Karlheinz, and a second son, Hermann-Josef ("Hermännchen"), was born in 1932. Gertrud played the piano and sang, but after three pregnancies in three years, she had a mental breakdown and was sent to a mental health facility in December 1932. Her younger son, Hermann, died a few months later.

From age seven, Stockhausen lived in Altenberg, where he took piano lessons from Franz-Josef Kloth, the Protestant organist at the Altenberger Dom. In 1938, his father remarried. His new wife, Luzia, had been the family’s housekeeper. They had two daughters. Stockhausen had a difficult relationship with his stepmother and moved to Xanten in 1942 to live at a teachers’ training college. There, he continued piano lessons and studied the oboe and violin. In 1941, he learned his mother had died, supposedly from leukemia. However, recent research shows she was murdered in a gas chamber at the Hadamar Killing Facility on May 27, 1941. Stockhausen later dramatized her death in his opera Donnerstag aus Licht.

In late 1944, Stockhausen was drafted as a stretcher bearer in Bedburg. In February 1945, he saw his father for the last time in Altenberg. Simon, who was on leave from the front, told his son, “I’m not coming back. Look after things.” By the end of the war, Simon was missing in action, likely killed in Hungary.

From 1947 to 1951, Stockhausen studied music pedagogy and piano at the Hochschule für Musik Köln (Cologne Conservatory of Music) and musicology, philosophy, and German studies at the University of Cologne. He studied harmony and counterpoint, the latter with Hermann Schroeder, but he did not focus on composition until 1950. That year, he joined the class of Swiss composer Frank Martin, who was teaching in Cologne for seven years.

At the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1951, Stockhausen met Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts, who had studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud in Paris. Inspired, Stockhausen moved to Paris in 1952 to attend Messiaen’s courses on aesthetics and analysis and Milhaud’s composition classes. He studied with Messiaen for a year but left Milhaud’s lessons after a few weeks.

In March 1953, Stockhausen began working as an assistant to Herbert Eimert at the newly created Electronic Music Studio of Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR), later known as Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. In 1963, he became the studio’s director. From 1954 to 1956, he studied phonetics, acoustics, and information theory at the University of Bonn with Werner Meyer-Eppler. He and Eimert co-edited the journal Die Reihe from 1955 to 1962.

On December 29, 1951, in Hamburg, Stockhausen married Doris Andreae. They had four children: Suja (born 1953), Christel (born 1956), Markus (born 1957), and Majella (born 1961). They divorced in 1965. On April 3, 1967, in San Francisco, he married Mary Bauermeister. They had two children: Julika (born 1966) and Simon (born 1967). They divorced in 1972.

Four of Stockhausen’s children became professional musicians. He composed works specifically for them. For example, his son Markus performed trumpet pieces like Sirius (1975–77) and In Freundschaft (1997). At age 4, Markus played the role of "The Child" in the Cologne premiere of Originale, sharing the part with his sister Christel. His daughter Majella performed Klavierstück XII and Klavierstück XIII at ages 16 and 20, respectively. His son Simon played saxophone duets in Donnerstag aus Licht and helped with synthesizer parts in the Licht operas. His daughter Christel is a flautist who performed and taught about Tierkreis in 1977.

In 1961, Stockhausen bought land near Kürten, a village east of Cologne. He built a house designed by architect Erich Schneider-Wessling and lived there from 1965.

Stockhausen taught at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt starting in 1953. He gave lectures and concerts in Europe, North America, and Asia. He was a guest professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and the University of California, Davis, in 1966–67. He founded and directed the Cologne Courses for New Music from 1963 to 1968.

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Compositions

Karlheinz Stockhausen composed 370 individual works. His music often differs greatly from traditional styles, and it was influenced by composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse, and Anton Webern, as well as by film and painters like Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.

Stockhausen began composing seriously during his third year at a music school. His early works were not published until 1971, when he released Chöre für Doris, Drei Lieder for alto voice and chamber orchestra, Choral for a cappella choir (all from 1950), and a Sonatine for violin and piano (1951).

In August 1951, shortly after visiting Darmstadt for the first time, Stockhausen started using a type of serial composition that avoided the twelve-tone technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg. He called these early works punktuelle Musik, or "punctual music," though some critics later noted that Stockhausen did not always compose in this style. Examples from this period include Kreuzspiel (1951), Klavierstücke I–IV (1952), and early versions of Punkte and Kontra-Punkte (1952). However, some of his works from this time introduced his first major innovation: "group composition," a method he used in many of his later compositions. He first explained this idea publicly in a radio talk titled Gruppenkomposition: Klavierstück I in December 1955.

In December 1952, Stockhausen created Konkrete Etüde, which was produced in a studio in Paris that specialized in musique concrète. In March 1953, he moved to a studio in Cologne and began experimenting with electronic music, creating two Electronic Studies (1953 and 1954). He later combined musique concrète and electronic sounds in Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56). His experiments showed that sound qualities, or timbres, are not always fixed. With guidance from his teacher, Hermann Meyer-Eppler, Stockhausen developed new rules for composition that focused on the unpredictable movement of sound. He later described this period as a time of major change, when musique concrète, electronic music, and spatial sound techniques were developed using tools like generators and modulators. His work Gesang der Jünglinge and three other compositions—Zeitmaße, Gruppen, and Klavierstück XI—helped establish him as a leading composer of his generation. The ideas behind these works were explained in his famous article "… wie die Zeit vergeht…" (". . . How Time Passes . . ."), published in 1957.

Stockhausen’s work with electronic music led him to explore ways for performers to shape music based on their skills and the environment, such as the acoustics of a concert hall. He called this approach "variable form." In some works, performers could choose how to interpret the music. For example, in Zyklus (1959), the score is written in a way that allows the performance to start on any page, be read upside down, or from right to left. He called these flexible approaches "polyvalent form," which could be either "open form" (incomplete, suggesting more than what is written) or "closed form" (complete and self-contained).

In many of his works, Stockhausen combined elements that contrast with each other. For example, in Kontra-Punkte (1952–53), which became his official "opus 1," isolated notes gradually develop into a more complex ending, while other parts move from variety to uniformity. In Gruppen (1955–57), musical passages of different speeds are played simultaneously across three orchestras, creating a sense of movement in space.

In Kontakte (1958–60), Stockhausen first balanced four musical elements—pitch, duration, dynamics, and timbre—in a unified way.

In 1960, Stockhausen returned to vocal music with Carré for four orchestras and four choirs. Two years later, he began a large-scale cantata titled Momente (1962–64/69), for solo soprano, four choir groups, and thirteen instrumentalists. In 1963, he created Plus-Minus, a work with basic musical materials and a system for transforming them into countless variations. Throughout the 1960s, he explored "process composition," where performers shape the music in real time. Examples include Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968), as well as Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Für kommende Zeiten (1968–70), which describe music verbally. Later works like Ylem (1972) and parts of Herbstmusik (1974) also use these methods. Some of these works were performed at Expo 70, where Stockhausen composed Pole and Expo. In other compositions, such as Stop (1965) and Adieu (1966), performers had limited opportunities to improvise.

Stockhausen introduced live electronics in works like Mixtur (1964/67/2003) for orchestra and electronics, Mikrophonie I (1964) for tam-tam and microphones, and Mikrophonie II (1965) for choir and electronic equipment. Improvisation played a role in these works, especially in Solo (1966), which features a melody instrument with feedback. He also composed Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen

Theories

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Stockhausen wrote a series of articles that showed how important he was in the field of music theory. These articles included analyses of music by composers such as Mozart, Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, Goeyvaerts, Boulez, Nono, Johannes Fritsch, Michael von Biel, and especially Webern. However, the parts of these articles that directly explained his own ideas about composition are considered the most important. The Texte, a collection of his writings, are the closest thing to a general theory of music composition for the time after World War II. His most famous article, "… wie die Zeit vergeht …" ("… How Time Passes …"), was first published in 1957. In this article, he explained ideas about time that influenced his compositions Zeitmaße, Gruppen, and Klavierstück XI. These ideas included: (1) a scale of twelve tempos similar to the chromatic pitch scale, (2) a method of creating smaller, repeated time divisions from a basic duration, like the overtone series, (3) the use of time fields and field sizes in both sequential and simultaneous ways, (4) ways to create large musical structures using proportions, (5) the idea of "statistical" composition, (6) the idea of "action duration" and "variable form," and (7) the concept of a "directionless temporal field" and "polyvalent form."

Other important articles from this time include "Elektronische und Instrumentale Musik" ("Electronic and Instrumental Music," 1958), "Musik im Raum" ("Music in Space," 1958), "Musik und Graphik" ("Music and Graphics," 1959), "Momentform" (1960), "Die Einheit der musikalischen Zeit" ("The Unity of Musical Time," 1961), and "Erfindung und Entdeckung" ("Invention and Discovery," 1961). The last article summarized the ideas he developed up to 1961. Together, these writings presented his theories about time in music.

Some of these ideas, when considered without their connection to specific compositions, faced a lot of criticism. Because of this, Stockhausen stopped publishing such articles for several years. He felt that "many useless polemics" had developed around his texts and chose to focus on composing instead.

During the 1960s, Stockhausen taught and gave public lectures, but he published few analytical or theoretical writings. He began writing theoretical articles again in 1970 with "Kriterien," which was an abstract of six seminar lectures he gave for the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. The seminars themselves, which covered seven topics, were published only after his death.

His collected writings, including his theories and analyses about music, were published in a book called Texte zur Musik.

Reception

Stockhausen is often called "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music." His early electronic works, especially the second one, greatly influenced the development of electronic music in the 1950s and 1960s. This influence can be seen in the work of composers like Franco Evangelisti from Italy and Andrzej Dobrowolski and Włodzimierz Kotoński from Poland. The influence of his compositions Kontra-Punkte, Zeitmaße, and Gruppen can also be found in the work of many composers, including Igor Stravinsky’s Threni (1957–58) and Movements for piano and orchestra (1958–59), as well as other works up to Variations: Aldous Huxley in Memoriam (1963–64). Stravinsky said in a 1957 conversation that the rhythms in some of his works may have been inspired by parts of Stockhausen’s Gruppen.

Among British composers, Sir Harrison Birtwistle says Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße influenced his two wind quintets, Refrains and Choruses and Five Distances, and Gruppen influenced his work overall. Brian Ferneyhough says that even though he did not fully understand the technical aspects of Stockhausen’s works like Klavierstücke I–IV, Kreuzspiel, and Kontra-Punkte at first, they still had a strong emotional effect on him and inspired his own musical exploration. Ferneyhough’s 1967 wind sextet Prometheus began as a wind quintet with cor anglais and was directly influenced by Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße.

In a short essay, Richard Barrett said Stockhausen’s works like Mantra, Gruppen, Carré, Klavierstück X, Inori, and Jubiläum have greatly influenced his own music.

French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez once said, "Stockhausen is the greatest living composer, and the only one I recognize as my equal." Boulez also said performing Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße helped him develop as a conductor. Another French composer, Jean-Claude Éloy, considers Stockhausen the most important composer of the second half of the 20th century and says all of Stockhausen’s works are "a powerful discovery and a true revelation."

Dutch composer Louis Andriessen says Stockhausen’s Momente influenced his 1968 work Contra tempus. German composer Wolfgang Rihm, who studied with Stockhausen, was influenced by Momente, Hymnen, and Inori.

At the Cologne ISCM Festival in 1960, Danish composer Per Nørgård heard Stockhausen’s Kontakte and works by Kagel, Boulez, and Berio. He said the experience changed his music style, making it more fragmented and disjunct, with elements of strict organization, some randomness, and controlled improvisation, as well as collage techniques from other musical styles.

Jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock, Yusef Lateef, and Anthony Braxton also cite Stockhausen as an influence.

Stockhausen’s influence extended to pop and rock music. Frank Zappa mentioned Stockhausen in the liner notes of his 1966 album Freak Out!. Pete Townshend of The Who, Rick Wright and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, and members of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead also said Stockhausen influenced their music. Stockhausen said the Grateful Dead were "well orientated toward new music." Members of the experimental band Can, Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, studied with Stockhausen. German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk and Icelandic singer Björk also said they studied with Stockhausen.

Stockhausen, along with John Cage, is one of the few avant-garde composers to have reached a wide audience. The Beatles included Stockhausen’s face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The songs "A Day in the Life" (1967) and "Revolution 9" (1968) were influenced by Stockhausen’s electronic music. A famous remark about Stockhausen was said by Sir Thomas Beecham, who reportedly replied, "No, but I believe I have trodden in some" when asked if he had heard Stockhausen’s music.

Stockhausen is also mentioned in literature, such as in Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). In The Crying of Lot 49, a bar called "The Scope" plays electronic music, and a character mentions Stockhausen’s work. French writer Michel Butor said Stockhausen’s electronic works Gesang der Jünglinge and Hymnen taught him a lot.

Later in life, Stockhausen was described by journalist John O’Mahony as eccentric, including claims that he lived with two women without being married to either and said he was born on a planet orbiting the star Sirius. Stockhausen also said he was educated on Sirius.

In 1995, BBC Radio 3 sent Stockhausen recordings from techno and ambient artists like Aphex Twin, Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Scanner, and Daniel Pemberton and asked for his opinion. Stockhausen gave advice to each artist, and most responded.

Robin Maconie said Stockhausen’s music has a depth and logical consistency that sets it apart from his contemporaries. He compared Stockhausen to Beethoven, saying Stockhausen’s music lasts because of its imaginative power.

Christopher Ballantine compared experimental and avant-garde music and concluded that

Igor Stravinsky expressed strong, though not entirely uncritical, admiration for Stockhausen’s music in his conversations with Robert Craft and organized private listening sessions with friends for years.

Honours

Among the many awards and honors given to Karlheinz Stockhausen are:

• 1964: German Gramophone Critics Award
• 1966 and 1972: SIMC Award for orchestral works (Italy)
• 1968: Grand Art Prize for Music of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia; Grand Prix du Disque (France); Member of the Free Academy of the Arts, Hamburg
• 1968, 1969, and 1971: Edison Prize (Netherlands)
• 1970: Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music
• 1973: Member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
• 1974: Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class (Germany)
• 1977: Member of the Philharmonic Academy of Rome
• 1979: Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
• 1980: Member of the European Academy of Science, Arts and Letters [fr]
• 1981: Prize of the Italian music critics for Donnerstag aus Licht
• 1982: German Gramophone Prize (German Phonograph Academy)
• 1983: Diapason d'or (France) for Donnerstag aus Licht
• 1985: Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
• 1986: Ernst von Siemens Music Prize
• 1987: Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, London
• 1988: Honorary Citizen of the Kuerten community
• 1989: Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1990: Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
• 1991: Honorary Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music; Accademico Onorario of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome; Honorary Patron of Sound Projects Weimar
• 1992: IMC-UNESCO Picasso Medal; Distinguished Service Medal of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia; German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Luzifers Tanz (3rd scene of Saturday from Light)
• 1993: Patron of the European Flute Festival; Diapason d'or for Klavierstücke I–XI and Mikrophonie I and II
• 1994: German Music Publishers Society Award for the score Jahreslauf (Act 1 of Tuesday from Light)
• 1995: Honorary Member of the German Society for Electro-Acoustic Music; Bach Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg
• 1996: Honorary doctorate (Dr. phil. h. c.) of the Free University of Berlin; Composer of the European Cultural Capital Copenhagen; Edison Prize (Netherlands) for Mantra; Member of the Free Academy of the Arts Leipzig; Honorary Member of the Leipzig Opera; Cologne Culture Prize
• 1997: German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Weltparlament (first scene of Wednesday from Light); Honorary member of the music ensemble LIM (Laboratorio de Interpretación Musical), Madrid
• 1999: Entry in the Golden Book of the city of Cologne
• 2000: German Music Publishers Society Award for the score Evas Erstgeburt (act 1 of Monday from Light)
• 2000–2001: The film In Absentia made by the Quay Brothers (England) to concrete and electronic music by Karlheinz Stockhausen won the Golden Dove (first prize) at the International Festival for Animated Film in Leipzig. Additional awards: Special Jury Mention, Montreal, FCMM 2000; Special Jury Award, Tampere 2000; Special Mention, Golden Prague Awards 2001; Honorary Diploma Award, Cracow 2001; Best Animated Short Film, 50th Melbourne International Film Festival 2001; Grand Prix, Turku Finland 2001
• 2001: German Music Publishers Society Award for the score Helicopter String Quartet (third scene of Wednesday from Light); Polar Music Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of the Arts
• 2002: Honorary Patron of the Sonic Arts Network, England
• 2003: German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Michaelion (4th scene of Wednesday from Light)
• 2004: Associated member of the Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres & des Beaux-arts (Belgium); Honorary doctorate (Dr. phil. h. c.) of the Queen's University in Belfast; German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of *Stop and Start

Documentary films

The documentary "Helicopter String Quartet" by Karlheinz Stockhausen was made in The Netherlands in 1995. It is 78 minutes long. Ton van der Lee [nl] is the producer, and Frank Scheffer is the director. The production company is Allegri Film. It can be watched on Medici.tv through streaming or DVD. A trailer is available.

The documentary "Stockhausen – Musik für eine bessere Welt" [de] was created in Germany in 2009. It is 56 minutes long. Norbert Busè and Thomas von Steinaecker [de] are the producer and co-director. The production company is Studio.TV.Film [de]. It has been broadcast on Arte and ZDF.