died...

http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2007/12/07/1148654-composer-karlheinz-stockhausen-is-dead

i only heard his name, but know very little about him... vaguely i remember i saw Pollini playing his music on youtube once (or maybe not his?).

If by "died" you mean "returned home to Sirius."

Bon Voyage. One of the most influential and imaginative composers of the 20th century.

I don't agree with everything he did, but this is still news that gives me pause.
I hope he managed to finish Licht.

He did (there's never been a complete performance though, for obvious reasons). After that, he started a cycle of chamber music based on the twelve hours of the day, but that one he didn't finish, I think.

Too bad. While I didn't love his music, he was definitely influential. I remember studying his Gruppen in my composition classes in college... Too bad...

Hard to believe. One of my favourite books:
Stockhausen Serves Imperialism

From the Daily Telegraph obituary

In the mid-1970s Stockhausen directed all his creative energies to his cycle of operas, Licht: die sieben Tage der Woche (Light: the Seven Days of the Week), composed, like Wagner's operas, to his own librettos... which some, even among his admirers, regarded as an act of gigantic egomania [and] has not established itself in any opera house's repertory. Nor, since the heyday of the 1960s, has most of Stockhausen's music. It has its fanatical advocates still who regard him as a visionary pathfinder, but most of the next generation of composers looked to Boulez before Stockhausen or to Ligeti before both. As for the mass of the general public, when not repelled, it remained baffled, convinced that this was not music and suspecting that the man was a charlatan or an opportunist playing a vast hoax on the whole world of music.

Personally, I don't think Thomas Beecham's comment[1] was too far from the truth...

-Michael B.
[1] When asked if he had heard any Stockhausen, he replied, "No, but I think I've trodden in some."

I think I heard in some cases what he was going for, and those few times he was successful. Other times, it feels like he is trying to get to a place but something is preventing the music from getting to it. My composition professor talked with Stockhausen a fair bit in the 70s and it was pretty clear that Stockhausen had to get the ego out of his music.

I think he wanted to but couldn't, maybe he was too predisposed to a certain cultural standard to break that barrier.

He still made wonderfully insightful advanced in musical philosophy, guiding electronic music instrument manufacturers, and supporting pioneering sites like WDR Cologne.

So I think the same thing on him we can think about quite a few pioneering composers mostly of the mid-20th century before things got established enough - we owe more to them for their non-musical output than their music. Certainly one could argue this to be the case for composers like Boulez (although some very admirable works, his establishment of IRCAM and everything that came out of it is an even greater accomplishment) and the Canadian Hugh Lecaine (writing the breakthrough "Dripsody" was a considerable achievement, but designing the first analog synthesizer and multi-track tape recorder, and then influencing Don Buchla to then go on to influence Bob Moog to form Moog synthesizers, would be considered by most as his ultimate contributions).

In the case of Lecaine, who seemed to be more of a engineer than a composer, we have the crossing from sciences into arts, a brave step and perfect timing for scientists in the 50s. But for Stockhausen and Boulez, to set aside their probably desire to be even more prolific than they were and step into the sciences to help increase the palette of art so much more (although it did take awhile for us to get to know what to *really* do with all these new techniques), is very commendable.

I hope people can see this other side of people like Stockhausen's work and see their greatest contribution to the world.

It's hard to imagine now, but the vast majority of sound we hear nowadays in synthesized or sampled. You can really trace it all back to those first sine wave generators in Cologne and the first single-track tape recorders at the Paris radio station being used by Pierre Schaeffer, Stockhausen and others.

We could have just as easily deemed electronics completely unsuitable for producing sound in that early vulnerable stage without composers that stepped in and made sure to see electronic music through its most vulnerable stage of development.

That closely matches an amusing comment made by my father when I was a lad listening to a Stockhausen recording. My father had very simple taste in music, and I still remember that moment with fondness.

wb:
My father had very simple taste in music,

Unlike Sir Thomas, or indeed many others with quite educated, wide-ranging, catholic and eclectic tastes in music, who still found Herr S's sonic efforts to be quite unbearable and too far removed from 'music' and too close to mere 'noise.' Personally I have listened to quite a lot of Stockhausen's (and other similar style) works inthe past, but soon came to the conclusion that life is too short to waste on such tedious things. YMMV, obviously

-Michael B.

LOL, Michael, that's how I feel about James Joyce!

Ahem... IMHO of course.

What ever people say about Joyce, he did occasionally write some amusing stuff. This made his subsequent descent into multilingual pun madness all the more tragic. For all I know, Stockhausen was completely lost from the beginning.

Ah... Ulysses!

something interesting he said himself about music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIPVc2Jvd0w

Jason:
Ah... Ulysses![/b]

Which most intelligent spell-checkers seem to want to correct to Useless

Michael B.

Back to Stockhausen, I went to a lecture he gave here in the late 60s when I was a student. It was actually very interesting, as I recall. A piece I really liked of his was Gesang der Jünglinge.

The same day, composer Andrew Imbrie died as well. I was more familiar with Imbrie's music, as he taught at Berkeley and it was played often there.

Unfortunately, a lot of academic composers write music which is extremely forgettable. At best, their students may become more successful. Sometimes it skips a generation: Dvorak taught some forgettable composers, who, in turn, taught composers like Copland and Ellington.