Karlheinz Stockhausen

Author: spencer

7 Dec

My electronic music teacher, Dr. Barker, turned our class on to a lot of cool 20th century experimental music — the kind that informed Radiohead when they were writing Kid-A. One of the highest-regarded early electronic music composers, Karl Stockenhausen, has passed away at age 79.

Apart from providing good shit to listen to while re-wiring your brain with LSD, composers like Stockenhausen expanded the idea of sound as music, bending traditional notions of scales and modes by using intense repetition of sound, the sounds of the everyday world, and the echoing acoustics of a hall, proving that basically anything can be regarded as music or art. He also pissed a lot of people off with that very notion.

Stockhausen sparked controversy in 2001, when he described the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as “the greatest work of art one can imagine” during a news conference in the northern German city of Hamburg, where several of the suicide pilots had lived.

Through his work in the field of electronic music, he is also considered one of the forefathers of techno. So I guess he’s also partially responsible for this:
idioteque