The work of Karlheinz Stockhausen has been a seminal influence on music and composition in the latter half of the 20th century. Starting from the strict application of the rules of SERIALISM, he pioneered and developed electronic music, continuing into aleatory music, intuitive music (folk music or other indigenous music that is not taught formally), and collective composition (compositions written by two or more composers in collaboration). His work has always been at the forefront of the avant-garde.
Stockhausen was born in Mödrath, Germany, on August 22, 1928. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother a housewife and amateur musician. Recurring mental health problems forced her to seek treatment in a sanatorium in 1932, where she remained until she was murdered in 1942 as part of the Nazi government’s policy of killing the mentally ill. His father also died during World War II.
Stockhausen first went to school in Altenberg, where he learned piano, violin, and oboe. In his later school years in Cologne, from 1944 to 1947, he took various jobs to earn money, working as a farmhand and a stretcher bearer during the difficult postwar years in Germany. In the evenings he pursued his musical career—as a rehearsal pianist for an operetta society, of which he became the director in 1947.
That year he started a four-year course at the Hochschule fur Musik at Cologne, where he specialised in piano under Hans-Otto Schmidt-Neuhaus. He also studied musical form and composition. At the same time, he attended Cologne University, studying musicology and philosophy.
At music school, Stockhausen studied the works of major contemporary composers, principally BARTóK, SCHOENBERG, and STRAVINSKY. His graduation thesis was on Bartok’s Sonata for two pianos and percussion. This came to the attention of Herbert Eimert at Cologne Radio, who arranged for a radio script to be made of the thesis, and for Stockhausen’s work to be broadcast to the radio audience. Eimert also arranged for the 23-year-old Stockhausen to give several talks on radio on the subject of mid 20th-century music. In 1951, Stockhausen attended the Darmstadt summer school, which was a centre for avant-garde composition. There he became familiar with Anton WEBERN’S serial compositional techniques, and encountered the work of Olivier MESSIAEN. In this period in the history of serialism, composers had begun to experiment with serial treatment of musical elements other than pitches.
Kreuzspiel (1951) for wind, piano, and percussion, was written as a direct result of this first encounter with serialism, and was regarded by Stockhausen as his first serious work. In Kreuzspiel, durations of one to 12 multiples of a fundamental unit are assigned to various pitch classes and permuted throughout the piece. The influence of Stockhausen’s part-time job as a jazz pianist can also be heard in this work, where the various instruments have solo “breaks” in the style of a jazz band.
After marrying his college girlfriend, Doris Andreae, Stockhausen took off for Paris to study with Messiaen for 14 months. It was in Paris that he had his first contact with electronic music, in the French radio studio for musique concrète.
In the compositions that he wrote in Paris, Stockhausen was already expanding the boundaries of serialism, and gradually working toward the idea of replacing the single notes of serial composition with a larger unit of a number of interrelated notes (the group). In his chamber piece for ten instruments, Kontrapunkte (1952, his first published work), Stockhausen used groups and also extended the idea of serialism to include the tempos of the piece, making a series out of the metronome markings 120, 126, 132, 152, 168, 184, and 200.
On his return to Cologne, Stockhausen was invited by Eimert to work in the newly established West German Radio recording studio for electronic music, of which Eimert was director. He started work on his revolutionary piece Studie I, which used only sounds produced by the sine-wave generator. This was followed by the equally innovative Studie II.
From 1953 to 1956, Stockhausen studied phonetics and communications theory at the University of Bonn, and became increasingly interested in the part played by the performers and the audience in music. This interest led to the second set of Klavierstücke (piano pieces), which gave the performer considerable freedom of interpretation. His woodwind quintet, Zeitmasze (1956), bases its tempos on the longest and shortest time the performers can sustain a note.
In Gesang der Jünglinge Stockhausen introduced to his work two new elements: the human voice and the idea of physical space as a musical component. The piece is composed of electronic sounds mixed with the voice of a choirboy singing the Benedicite, and is played through five groups of loudspeakers so that the sound issues from different directions at different moments. He experimented during this period with the relation between audience and performers, surrounding the former with three orchestras in Gruppen (1957).
Another musical element that Stockhausen subjected to permutation was that of the order of sections within a suite. Klavierstück XI (1956) is a suite of pieces that the pianist can play in any order. Three repetitions of any single section ends a performance of Klavierstück IX, in which the player may choose any of six designated tempi, dynamic intensity, and stroke articulation.
In the summer of 1957, Stockhausen returned to Darmstadt to teach composition for the first time. Over the years that he taught at Darmstadt, he gradually evolved a technique of collective composition with his students that was to be reflected in the direction of his own music. An early test piece that he wrote at Darmstadt for percussion players is Zyklus, in which the player is surrounded by his instruments. He begins on one instrument at any page of the score, which is bound in a spiral notebook, and completes the work in sequence while completing the physical circle of instruments.
Stockhausen also conceived the idea that a piece of music is composed of experiential “moments,” each of which has an equal claim to the listener’s attention. This was the basis of Kontakte (1960), which had two versions, one purely electronic, and one in which electronic sounds were combined with piano and percussion. This was followed by Momente (1961), in which a soprano voice, four choral groups, and 13 instruments are used to produce a succession of “moments.” The structure is so free that additional moments can be added or the original ones dropped, without noticeable effect on the piece.
An essential element in Stockhausen’s development has been working with live performers while composition is in progress. This started at Darmstadt, and continued when he established his own group in 1964. This group performed the live-electronic piece Mikrophonie I in December 1964, in Brussels. Other pieces followed, including the two-hour Hymnen (1966), in which melodies are enhanced by “found sounds” produced by both concrete and electronic means.
In the 1960s, Stockhausen became increasingly interested in magic, ritual, and the religion of the East. In the vocal piece Stimmung (1968), the six performers sit cross-legged in a ritualistic circle. In Mantra (1970), he mixed two pianos, two woodblocks, and crotales (finger cymbals) with two sine-wave oscillators—here each note of the chromatic scale produced on one oscillator is mixed with the held pitch on the other oscillator. The effect is hypnotic—similar to that of a mantra chanted in meditation.
In the 1970s, Stockhausen’s music became more explicitly theatrical, including works such as Inori (1974), and Sirius (1977). The same year, he started on a seven opera series, Licht, which was designed to fill seven consecutive evenings. The work began with Donnerstag (1980), and continued through the days of the week with Samstag (1984), and Montag (1988), and used combinations of dancers, an actor, chorus, and conventional instruments with or without electronic tape. He continues to be a pioneer, generating excitement through his own charisma and the conviction and drama of his works.
Jane Prendergast
SEE ALSO:
ALEATORY MUSIC; DARMSTADT SCHOOL; ELECTRONIC MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Kurtz, Michael, trans. Richard Toop. Stockhausen:
A Biography (London: Faber, 1992);
Maconie, Robin. The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Atmen gibt das Leben;
Aus den Sieben Tagen; Kontakte;
Licht: Donnerstag; Mantra; Zyklus.