Karlheinz Stockhausen RIP

Serious music lost one of its great innovators with the death this week of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The German avant-gardiste was one of the most challenging musicians. But when your music is feted as the most important in the modernist canon and your name is freely associated with pioneers in other genres like Miles Davis (qv) and Brian Eno (qv), listeners seriously into music owe your work a fair hearing. And, for all its austere, egghead associations, Stockhausen's best work is reasonably approachable. His trademark sound incorporates Eastern religious influences and mysticism. His is the most successful employment of electronics in serious music. His best-known work is Young Boys’ Song, a landmark in electronica. Licht, a series of seven operas, has its supporters (and detractors).

Most popular in the hippie era of the 1960s, when he influenced West Coast rock bands like the Grateful Dead, Stockhausen was, for a time, very influential in the newly ambitious pop culture – his portrait is included on Peter Blake’s sleeve for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: hipper than that it was not possible to be.

If Miles Davis listened to Stockhausen, and if the fabled Montreux festival concert venue named one of its auditoria after him, you owe it to yourself to check out what all the fuss is about.

BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting a 90 minute tribute at 2230 tomorrow in its Hear & Now slot: a must-listen for grown-ups.



Gerry Smith