[F_minor] Karlheinz Stockhausen dies at 79;also ... Holiday music recommendations?

["Robert Merkin" <bobmerk@earthlink.net>]

Uhhh ... it's that time of year again ... anybody have any recommendations
for beautiful Christmas music? I'm getting a little tired of listening to
John Denver and The Muppets.

And of course also: Happiest of Holidays to All!

===============

I own some Stockhausen LPs. I can't exactly sing his praises as I can for
GG or Mozart, but he always gave me my money's worth. I never thought of
him as a musical humbug or a charlatan. (I'll be happy to supply a few
names of those, and a couple of old avant-garde jokes.)

I'd be authentically appreciative if anyone had something more profound or
factual to say about Stockhausen's achievements, his place in the music of
our era. And of course, is there an Intersection Set of GG and Stockhausen?

Some futures are easier to navigate to than others. Computers, for example,
seem to have offered us a very wide, smooth (if unpredictable and
surprising) boulevard from their primitive origins to the present, and
promise to keep getting better, friendlier, cheaper, faster, more powerful.

Music -- a much more difficult path to the future, strewn with ghastly and
laughable dead ends and failures calling for prompt forgetting. My 20th
Century avant-garde and electronic collection -- and it's not a tiny
collection, I've always been very curious about Future Music, and I've
always wanted to get there first if there was something interesting or
perhaps even beautiful to get to -- this has turned out to be a much more
disappointing body of music. Much of which questions whether it even earned
the right to be called music.

==============

Reuters
Friday 7 December 2007

Pioneering German composer Stockhausen dies
 
BERLIN (Reuters) -- German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the
world's most influential 20th century composers and a pioneer of electronic
music, has died aged 79.

German broadcaster WDR, with whom Stockhausen worked closely for more than
two decades, said in a statement he had died on Wednesday after a short
illness at his home near Cologne in western Germany.

Best known for experiments with electronic music in the 1960s and 70s,
Stockhausen, who composed more than 300 individual works, also had a
significant impact on avant-garde and classical music.

The Beatles paid tribute to Stockhausen by putting him along with other
icons on the cover of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Miles
Davis and more recently Bjork have cited him as a musical influence.

"Any sound can become music if it is related to other sounds ... every
sound is precious and can become beautiful if I put it at the right place,
at the right moment," he once said in an interview. He also said he loved
silence.

Stockhausen came under fire for comments about the September 11 attacks on
the United States. He was quoted as saying the strikes were "the greatest
work of art imaginable."

"Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in
music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a
concert and then dying, just imagine what happened there," he was quoted as
saying. He later said he meant that only the devil could have orchestrated
the attacks.

EXPERIMENTS

Early in his career, Stockhausen dabbled in "musique concrete," recording
everyday sounds, distorting them electronically and joining them together
to form a composition.

>From works for solo instruments to large-scale events mixing opera, dance
and mime, Stockhausen said he aimed to awaken "a completely new
consciousness" in listener and performer.

Born on August 22, 1928, in Burg Modrath, a village near Cologne,
Stockhausen said he was badly scarred by his experience of World War Two,
in which he was a stretcher-bearer.

His father, a schoolmaster, died serving in the German army.

In his 20s Stockhausen flirted with jazz, playing the piano to support
himself through the Cologne Music School, where he gained a teaching
certificate in 1951.

He had already begun to compose, and moved to Paris to study under
composers Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen.

His experiments with electronic music took off at the newly-founded West
German Radio (WDR) Studio for New Music in Cologne, where he worked from
1953, later becoming its artistic director.

"With Karlheinz Stockhausen we have lost an extraordinary artist and
avant-garde musician of international status," said Monika Piel, artistic
director of WDR.

"Many composing principles which Stockhausen developed were ground-breaking
and moulded a style for future generations."

Daniel Barenboim, after conducting a performance of Wagner in Milan on
Friday, called Stockhausen "one of those composers that will I think always
have an important place in the history of music."

He added: "He is someone who will have influence on the future evolution of
music."

Stockhausen found his own ways of assembling sounds to form a composition,
developing the ideas of an earlier generation of European composers, like
Schoenberg, who composed around a series of sounds instead of developing
and repeating a theme.

In early works Stockhausen explored not melody, but the quality and
relation of one sound to another.

In a mix of solo and ensemble music, electronic and concrete techniques
together with mime, a key work "Licht" was premiered at Milan's La Scala
opera house in 1981, marking Stockhausen's increasing stature in
conventional classical circles.

The composer was married twice and had six children. He will be buried in a
forest cemetery in the town of Kuerten, near Cologne, said German media,
quoting the Stockhausen Foundation.

- 30 -

(Reporting by Madeline Chambers; editing by Andrew Roche)

© Reuters2007All rights reserved
 
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