Karlheinz Stockhausen facts for kids
Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22, 1928 – died December 5, 2007) was a German composer. Many people see him as one of the most important and also most talked-about composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is famous for his amazing work in electronic music. He also brought new ideas like controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into his music and explored how sound moves in space (spatialization).
Stockhausen studied music at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the University of Cologne. He also learned from famous composers like Olivier Messiaen in Paris. His music and ideas had a big impact on many other composers, not just in classical music, but also in jazz and pop music. He wrote music for almost sixty years, and his pieces often broke away from traditional rules.
His works include electronic music, pieces for solo instruments, songs, chamber music, choral music, and orchestral music. He even wrote a huge series of seven operas. He won many awards for his compositions and recordings.
Some of his well-known pieces are the Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces), the electronic Gesang der Jünglinge, Gruppen for three orchestras, and the opera cycle Licht.
He passed away at his home in Kürten, Germany, on December 5, 2007, at the age of 79.
Biography
Childhood Years
Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in a manor house called Burg Mödrath, near Kerpen. This house was once a maternity home and later an orphanage. In 2017, it became an art exhibition space and a museum for the WDR Electronic Music Studio, where Stockhausen worked.
His father, Simon Stockhausen, was a schoolteacher. His mother, Gertrud, played the piano. Karlheinz had a younger sister, Katherina, and a brother, Hermann-Josef. When Karlheinz was young, his mother faced mental health challenges and was institutionalized. His younger brother, Hermann, also passed away.
From age seven, Stockhausen lived in Altenberg. He started learning piano from the organist of the Altenberger Dom, Franz-Josef Kloth. In 1938, his father remarried. Karlheinz moved to a teachers' training college in Xanten in 1942, where he continued his piano lessons and also studied oboe and violin. He later learned that his mother had died during World War II. It is now understood that she was a victim of the Nazi regime's terrible policies against people with disabilities. Stockhausen later included a scene about his mother's death in his opera Donnerstag aus Licht.
In late 1944, Stockhausen was made to serve as a stretcher bearer in Bedburg during the war. His father went missing in action in 1945 and was likely killed in Hungary.
His Education
From 1947 to 1951, Stockhausen studied music and piano at the Hochschule für Musik Köln (Cologne Conservatory of Music). He also studied music history and philosophy at the University of Cologne. He didn't become truly interested in composing until 1950.
In 1951, he met composer Karel Goeyvaerts at a music course in Darmstadt. This meeting inspired Stockhausen to study in Paris with Olivier Messiaen, a famous French composer. He moved to Paris in 1952 and learned a lot from Messiaen.
In 1953, he moved to Cologne to work as an assistant at the new Electronic Music Studio of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). He later became the director of this studio in 1963. From 1954 to 1956, he also studied phonetics and acoustics at the University of Bonn.
Career and Adult Life
Family and Home
Stockhausen married Doris Andreae in 1951, and they had four children: Suja, Christel, Markus, and Majella. They divorced in 1965. In 1967, he married Mary Bauermeister, and they had two children: Julika and Simon. They divorced in 1972.
Four of Stockhausen's children became professional musicians. He even wrote some of his music especially for them. For example, many trumpet pieces were written for his son Markus. His daughter Majella performed his piano pieces when she was a teenager. His son Simon played synthesizer parts in his operas.
In 1961, Stockhausen bought land near Kürten, a village east of Cologne. He had a house built there that was designed just for him, and he lived there from 1965.
Teaching Music
Stockhausen gave lectures and concerts all over the world. He was a guest professor at universities in the United States. From 1963 to 1968, he led the Cologne Courses for New Music. He also taught as a Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik Köln from 1971 to 1977. In 1998, he started the Stockhausen Courses, which are held every year in Kürten.
Publishing His Works
From the mid-1950s, Stockhausen designed his own musical scores for his publisher. These scores often looked very unusual. In the early 1970s, he started his own company, Stockhausen-Verlag, to publish his music himself. This allowed him to be even more creative with how his music was written down. His scores won many awards.
He also started his own record company to make sure his recordings were always available on CD.
His Passing
Karlheinz Stockhausen died suddenly on December 5, 2007, in Kürten. He was 79 years old. The night before, he had just finished a new piece of music.
Compositions
Stockhausen wrote 370 individual pieces of music. He often broke away from traditional music styles. His work was inspired by other composers like Olivier Messiaen and by artists and films.
Music from the 1950s
Stockhausen began composing seriously during his third year at the conservatory. Some of his early student pieces were published later.
In 1951, Stockhausen started working with a style called "serial composition." This was a new way of organizing music that was different from older methods. Some of his early works, like Klavierstück IV (1952), are examples of what he called "punctual music," where notes are like individual points. He also developed "group composition," where musical ideas are organized into larger groups.
In 1952, he created a piece called Konkrete Etüde using pre-recorded sounds. In 1953, he moved to the electronic music studio in Cologne. There, he made two Electronic Studies (1953 and 1954). He then created Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56), which used both recorded and electronic sounds and explored how sounds could move around in space. This piece, along with Zeitmaße, Gruppen, and Klavierstück XI, made him a leading composer of his time.
His work with electronic music, which was fixed on tape, made him think about how live performers could have more freedom. He called this "variable form." In pieces like Zyklus (1959), he used graphic notation, where the score looked more like a drawing, and performers could even start on any page. He called these "polyvalent forms."
In Kontakte (1958–60), he explored how different musical elements like pitch, duration, dynamics, and timbre could be linked together.
Music from the 1960s
In 1960, Stockhausen returned to writing music for voices with Carré for four orchestras and four choirs. Later, he started a large vocal piece called Momente (1962–64/69). In 1963, he created Plus-Minus, which gave performers basic musical ideas and rules to create many different compositions. He continued to explore this "process composition" in works like Prozession (1967) and Aus den sieben Tagen (1968), which used verbal instructions instead of traditional notes.
He also pioneered "live electronics" in pieces like Mixtur (1964) for orchestra and electronics, and Mikrophonie I (1964) for a tam-tam with microphones and filters. In these works, improvisation by the performers was important. He also composed electronic works for tape, like Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966–67). Telemusik was one of the first times he used music from different world traditions in his compositions.
In 1968, Stockhausen composed Stimmung, a vocal piece for six singers that lasts an hour and is based on the overtones of a single low note. The next year, he created Fresco for four orchestral groups, which was meant to be played for hours in the foyers of a concert hall.
Space Music and Expo '70
Since the mid-1950s, Stockhausen was very interested in spatialization. This means making sounds move around the audience. He used this idea in his electronic music, like Gesang der Jünglinge, which used five channels of sound. He also used it in instrumental works like Gruppen for three orchestras. He even suggested building new concert halls designed for spatial music.
In 1968, the German government asked Stockhausen to help design the German Pavilion at the 1970 World Fair in Osaka, Japan. He convinced the architect to design a spherical auditorium where the audience would sit in the center, surrounded by loudspeakers in seven rings. This allowed the sound to move all around the listeners.
Stockhausen's music was played for 5½ hours every day for 183 days at Expo '70. About a million people listened to his works. Many visitors found the spherical auditorium to be a peaceful place, and it became one of the main attractions of the Expo.
Music from the 1970s
Starting with Mantra for two pianos and electronics (1970), Stockhausen began using a new technique called "formula composition." This involved using a single, simple melody or "formula" that would be stretched and changed throughout the piece. Sometimes, this formula was played at the very beginning, like in Mantra. He used this technique until he finished his opera cycle Licht in 2003.
Some of his works from the 1970s, like Tierkreis ("Zodiac", 1974–75) and In Freundschaft (In Friendship, 1977), became very popular. These pieces had a simpler, more melodic style. This simpler style influenced a new group of German composers.
Other large works from this time include the orchestral piece Trans (1971) and the science-fiction "opera" Sirius (1975–77), which used eight-channel electronic music.
The Licht Opera Cycle (1977–2003)
Between 1977 and 2003, Stockhausen composed seven operas that formed a huge cycle called Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche ("Light: The Seven Days of the Week"). Each opera was named after a day of the week and explored ideas and traits linked to that day, like birth, conflict, or learning. The operas also featured three main characters: Michael, Lucifer, and Eve. Each character was central to one opera, and their relationships were explored in others.
Stockhausen saw his operas as ceremonies or rituals. He was inspired by Japanese Noh theatre and different mythologies. He sometimes used invented languages or had instrumentalists and dancers play roles instead of just singers.
The seven operas were not composed in order of the days of the week. He started with Donnerstag (Thursday, 1978–80), Samstag (Saturday, 1981–83), and Montag (Monday, 1984–88), and finished with Sonntag (Sunday, 1998–2003).
One very famous and unusual piece from this cycle is the Helikopter-Streichquartett (Helicopter String Quartet), completed in 1993. In this piece, the four members of a string quartet perform inside four helicopters flying separately. The sounds they play are mixed with the helicopter sounds and sent to the audience in the concert hall through speakers. Videos of the performers are also shown in the hall. This piece has been performed several times, including at the Holland Festival and the Salzburg Festival.
In 1999, Stockhausen worked with filmmakers Stephen and Timothy Quay on a short film called In Absentia. He adapted 21 minutes of his electronic music for the film. The filmmakers were surprised to learn that the film's story, about a woman in an asylum, was very similar to what happened to Stockhausen's own mother.
Music from 2003–2007
After finishing Licht, Stockhausen started a new cycle of compositions called Klang ("Sound"), based on the hours of the day. He completed 21 of these pieces before he died. The first few hours include Himmelfahrt (Ascension) for organ and voices, Freude (Joy) for two harps, and Natürliche Dauern (Natural Durations) for piano.
The Thirteenth Hour, Cosmic Pulses, is an electronic work made by layering 24 different sounds, each moving in its own way among eight loudspeakers. The later hours are solo pieces for different instruments and voices, each with electronic sounds from Cosmic Pulses. All 21 completed pieces were performed together for the first time in 2010.
His Musical Ideas
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Stockhausen published many articles about music theory. These articles were very important for understanding his own music and for music in general during that time. His most famous article is "... wie die Zeit vergeht ..." ("... How Time Passes ..."), published in 1957. In this article, he explained new ideas about time in music, like creating a scale of twelve tempos (speeds) similar to the chromatic pitch scale. He also talked about how to divide musical durations and how to create large-scale musical forms using proportions.
He also wrote about "statistical" composition and "variable form," where some parts of the music could change during a performance. He also discussed "polyvalent form," where a piece could be played in different ways or start at different points.
Other important articles from this time included "Electronic and Instrumental Music" and "Music in Space," where he discussed how sound could be used in three dimensions. These ideas were very new and sometimes caused a lot of discussion.
Stockhausen later collected all his writings in a series of books called Texte zur Musik.
Awards and Honours
Karlheinz Stockhausen received many awards and honors throughout his life, including:
- 1964 German gramophone critics award.
- 1968 Grand Art Prize for Music of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
- 1968, 1969, and 1971 Edison Prize (Netherlands).
- 1970 Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
- 1974 Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class (Germany).
- 1979 Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
- 1985 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France).
- 1986 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.
- 1987 Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, London.
- 1988 Honorary Citizen of the Kuerten community.
- 1992 IMC-UNESCO Picasso Medal.
- 1995 Bach Award of the city of Hamburg.
- 1996 Honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin.
- 2001 Polar Music Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of the Arts.
- 2008 The square in his hometown of Kürten was renamed Karlheinz-Stockhausen-Platz in his honor.
- 2010 The municipality of Kürten adopted the name "Stockhausengemeinde" (Stockhausen municipality).
See also
In Spanish: Karlheinz Stockhausen para niños
