By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Karlheinz Stockhausen, 79, an avant-garde German composer who influenced a generation of musicians with pioneering electronic music and whose reputation was damaged by provocative statements about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, died Dec. 5. Members of his family announced his death in Germany, but the cause was not reported.
In the 1950s, when he combined electronic sounds with the human voice and musical instruments, Mr. Stockhausen defined a new form of music. His influence was felt in classical music, jazz and pop, among musicians as diverse as Pierre Boulez, Miles Davis, the Grateful Dead and Bjork.
Mr. Stockhausen composed a daringly original form of music that abandoned standard notation and structure in favor of chance encounters of sound. He won critical acclaim early in his career, if not always eager listeners.
Public opinion seemed to converge in outrage in 2001, after he commented on the nature of the terrorist attacks: "That minds accomplish in one act something that we in music can't dream of, that people rehearse like mad for 10 years -- totally fanatically -- for a concert and then die. That's the greatest work of art there is in the entire cosmos."
Mr. Stockhausen was stunned by the angry response, which led to the cancellation of concerts in the United States and Europe. He claimed he was referring to the works of Lucifer, a devil who figured in some of his compositions. Ultimately, he issued a full apology.
His music was often dauntingly difficult and sometimes featured as many as four orchestras playing simultaneously. He interspersed electrical tones with hand claps, grunts, whispers and shouts until, in his words, "the distinction between sound and music disappears."
One of his most ambitious works, a seven-part opera called "Licht" ("Light"), took him almost 30 years to write. When he completed it in 2005, it was 29 hours long. His 1995 "Helicopter Quartet" was performed by musicians in four helicopters hovering over an outdoor audience.
"He is, in some ways, the musical Christo," Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott wrote in 2000, "exploring wild ideas that stretch the usual concepts of musical time and space to the limits; and yet, like Christo's art, there's often an eerie sense of dreamlike beauty in his music."
By the 1990s, however, Mr. Stockhausen's early luster was fading. Roger Scruton, a British philosopher and musicologist, derided him as "a pseudo-intellectual hippie-mystic with a liberating gift for creating utter nonsense."
Although Mr. Stockhausen often said he was from a planet circling the star Sirius, he was actually born in Modrath, Germany, on Aug. 22, 1928. His mother was sent to a psychiatric hospital when he was 4 and was executed nine years later as part of a Nazi euthanasia program. His father, a schoolteacher, was killed while fighting in World War II.
Mr. Stockhausen, as a teenager, was also in uniform during the war, carrying stretchers and working in a medical ward. To support himself after the war, he sold black-market cigarettes, worked on a farm and played piano in nightclubs for a magic act.
He had early dreams of being a writer but switched to music at a conservatory in Cologne. He spent a formative year in Paris studying with composers Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud.
Returning to Germany, he studied physics, acoustics and phonetics at the University of Bonn and, in 1953, composed his first work of electronic music. The first responses ranged from rapture to fury, but Mr. Stockhausen found many followers among musicians.
For years, he was in demand as a performer and lecturer. When he taught at the University of California at Davis in 1967, his students included members of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention.
His ideas found their way into the works of jazz performers Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor and Charles Mingus. Mr. Stockhausen's 1966 composition "Hymnen," which combined electronic static and shrieks with distorted national anthems, became the inspiration for John Lennon's "Revolution No. 9."
In 1967, Mr. Stockhausen's face appeared on the cover of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," sandwiched in the back row between Lenny Bruce and W.C. Fields.
Mr. Stockhausen's sometimes tempestuous private life surfaced in his music on occasion, particularly in 1968, when he went on a seven-day hunger strike after his second wife left him.
"During the seven days I had wonderful visions and sound experiences," he later said. "Every so often I would sit down by the piano and play a single note."
He expected musicians who played the resulting composition, "From the Seven Days," to fast beforehand.
His marriages to Doris Andreae and Mary Bauermeister ended in divorce.
In recent years, he lived in K¿rten, Germany, with American saxophonist Suzanne Stephens and Dutch flutist Kathinka Pasveer. Other survivors include four children from his first marriage; two children from his second marriage; and at least 16 grandchildren.