Obit :: Karlheinz Stockhausen [1928-2007]

This has apparently ruined indierocket! familiar (and occasional Free Times and Drawer B contributor) Logan's weekend: Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the great visionaries of 20th Century music, died on Dec. 5. Best known for his avant-garde electronic work, Stockhausen was an experimental musician who utilized tape recorders and mathematics to create innovative, ground-breaking pieces. Electronic Study, composed in 1953, was the first musical piece composed from pure sine wave sounds; Electronic Study II, produced a year later, was the first work of electronic music to be notated and published. Endlessly prolific, whether in fashion or out of it, he composed 362 works, including the world's longest opera, Licht, a sequence of seven pieces — one for every day of the week. Licht, which took him 25 years to complete, will be performed for the first time next year; the whole piece lasts 29 hours. Though rarely embraced by mainstream audiences, diverse musicians such as Paul McCartney, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa and Bjork cited Stockhausen as an influence, and he’s often mentioned in the same breath as Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Morton Feldman as one of the most important experimental composers in the latter half of the 20th Century.

[Ed.'s note: You can find Logan's tribute to Karlheinz Stockhausen here. -p.]