Stockhausen

He made the cover of Sergeant Pepper, and appeared in novels by Pynchon and Donald Barthelme (who portrayed his compositions as a fictional form of waterboarding). He claimed to have been born on the dog star Sirius. He proudly proclaimed himself "the grandchild of great composers", and he spent the last years of his life trying to live down an ill-observed comparison of the 9/11 terror attacks to "the greatest work of art imaginable in the whole cosmos." He once composed a string quartet to be played while the musicians rode airborne in four helicopters (the music was piped into the concert hall electronically), and one of his last compositions was a symphonic work of 24 one-hour suites, to be played 'round the clock over the course of a single day.

He was many things, but modest and unambitious, he assuredly was not.

Then again, he had no need to be. Like few other artists of the modern era---Hendrix and Stravinsky come readily to mind, and scant few others---he singlehandedly redrew the boundaries of the Western musical canon before reaching his 30th birthday; like those other artists, he not only pioneered wholly inventive new modes of composition and performance, but his approach to his art---and the results that sprang forth from it---forced generations of listeners to ask themselves what the nature of music really is, and what it should or should not be considered. Even his compositional style---and his scores, if some of them can even be called such---forced experienced musicians to read, interpret, and even at times "intuit", his music in ways previously unimagined.

And his greatest works still challenge today: Gesange Der Junglinge, Kontakte, Mikrophonie (a score excerpt is pictured above) and the epochal Hymnen, all composed for electronic instruments within a twelve-year timespan in the '50s and '60s. There were some 280 other works that spring from his fertile mind before he returned home to Sirius this week (or whatever celestial body he came from), but it is these and other compositions for microphones, tape recorders, ring modulators and all other manner of analog electronica that left their mark most indelibly on the musical landscape of our times.

Among like-minded contemporaries, only Berio, Boulez, Xenakis and Gyorgy Ligeti could be considered his equals (Cage and Messiaen being some 20 years his senior), and there is scarcely a musician working in electronic media these days who hasn't been influenced---however unknowingly---by his work. It's a shame he will primarily be remembered in this country among the general public as just another crazy Euro who hated America . . . but in sum, he was one of the true giants of 20th century music, and he didn't hesitate to remind people of it whenever the subject arose. His artistic brilliance, it might be said, fed his egomaniacal weaknesses, but our music and our culture have been immeasurably enriched by the 79 years he spent among us meek earthlings.

---Vitelius