Stockhausen made three orchestras play as one argument
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) stands among the twentieth century’s most important—and argued-over—composers. Trained in Cologne, with Messiaen in Paris and Meyer-Eppler in Bonn, he helped define Darmstadt modernism through piano cycles, electronic Gesang der Jünglinge, and Gruppen for three orchestras.
He was born in Burg Mödrath near Kerpen, a manor house then serving as the district maternity home; the village around it was cleared in 1956 for lignite mining. His father Simon was a schoolteacher. His mother Gertrud, worn down by three pregnancies in three years, broke down and was institutionalised in 1932. The family was told she died of leukaemia in 1941, but she was in fact killed in the gas chamber at Hadamar on 27 May 1941 under the Nazi programme against so-called useless eaters. He later staged a version of her death in his opera Donnerstag aus Licht.
From age seven he lived in Altenberg, taking first piano lessons from the cathedral organist. Unhappy with his stepmother, he boarded at a teacher-training college in Xanten from 1942, adding oboe and violin. He later studied at the Cologne music academy and university, under Olivier Messiaen in Paris, and under the phonetics scholar Werner Meyer-Eppler at Bonn.
Hailed as the father of electronic music, he brought controlled chance into serial writing and made the placement of sound in space part of composition. He worked in the WDR electronic studio in Cologne from 1953 until shortly before it closed in 2000, and a museum of that studio now occupies his birthplace. As a leading Darmstadt School figure he influenced jazz and pop as well as concert music.
Across nearly sixty years his output ran from music-box miniatures to Gruppen for three orchestras, Stimmung for six singers, Mantra for two pianos and electronics, and Licht, a cycle of seven full-length operas. His writings fill ten volumes. He died at home in Kürten in 2007, aged 79.
Source: Karlheinz Stockhausen
