Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) composed 375 individual works, including the opera cycle LICHT – Die sieben Tage der Woche (LIGHT – The Seven Days of the Week), which was written between 1977 and 2003, totalling around 29 hours of music. All seven parts of the musical work have already been premiered: THURSDAY (1981), SATURDAY (1984), MONDAY (1988) were produced by La Scala in Milan, TUESDAY (1993) and FRIDAY (1996) at Leipzig Opera, and SUNDAY (2011) by Cologne Opera. WEDNESDAY, the final day of the LICHT heptalogy, was premiered by the Birmingham Opera Company in 2012.

Stockhausen had the goal of setting to music not only the week but also the hours of the day, the minute and the second, following up LICHT with the cycle KLANG – Die 24 Stunden des Tages (SOUND – The 24 Hours of the Day). Until his death in December 2007, he composed 21 hours, starting with the first hour, Ascension, and ending with the 21st hour, Paradise.

Karlheinz Stockhausen began his compositional career in the early 1950s. He achieved international fame with his early works of pointillist music, such as Kreuzspiel (1951), Spiel für Orchester (1952), and Kontra-Punkte (1952/53). Since then, many of his compositions have broken new ground in the subgenres of music after 1950: serial music, electronic music, new percussion music, variable music, new piano music, spatial music, statistical music, aleatoric music, live electronic music; as well as for new syntheses of music and language, musical theatre, ritual music, and scenic music; and additionally, group composition, polyphonic process composition, moment composition, formula composition, and multiform composition. He was a pioneer in integrating found objects (such as national anthems, folklore from all countries, shortwave events, and sound scenes) into his interpretation of world music and universal music. He combined European, African, Latin American, and Asian music into his tele-music.

Stockhausen’s entire oeuvre is characterised by a spiritual dimension, which is evident not only in compositions with sacred texts, but also in overtone music, intuitive music, mantric music, and cosmic music, as in Stimmung, Aus den sieben Tagen, Mantra, Sternklang, INORI, Atmen gibt das Leben, Sirius, LICHT, and KLANG. Stockhausen himself conducted or performed in almost all premieres of his works, or served as sound director, realising numerous exemplary performances and recordings around the world.

Most of Stockhausen’s works composed up to 1970 were performed in a spherical auditorium he designed to an audience of over a million during the Expo ’70 world’s fair in Osaka, Japan, with 20 instrumentalists and singers performing five and a half hours a day for 183 days. Stockhausen held several visiting professorships in Switzerland, the USA, Finland, Holland, and Denmark. In 1971, he was appointed professor of composition at the Cologne University of Music, in 1996 he received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin, and in 2004 he received an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast. He was a member of twelve international academies of arts and sciences, an honorary citizen of the municipality of Kürten since 1988, and a Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He received many recording awards as well as honours including the Federal Cross of Merit First Class, the Siemens Music Prize, the UNESCO Picasso Medal, the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, several music publishing awards from the German Music Publishers Association, the BACH Prize Hamburg, the Cologne Culture Prize, and the Polar Music Prize with the following laudatory speech: “Karlheinz Stockhausen is being awarded the Polar Music Prize for 2001 for a career as a composer that has been characterized by impeccable integrity and never-ceasing creativity, and for having stood at the forefront of musical development for fifty years.”

Stockhausen’s early works were mainly published by Universal Edition Vienna, while all later works (from work no. 30 onwards) were published by Stockhausen-Verlag, founded in 1975, which has also released a 150-compact-disc complete edition of Stockhausen’s works. In addition to his musical output, Stockhausen has published ten volumes of Texte zur Musik, a series of booklets with sketches and explanations of his own compositions, and a CD of lectures and interviews.