Karlheinz Stockhausen Karlheinz Stockhausen (Karlheinz Stockhausen) was the greatest German avant-garde composer, pianist, conductor and musicologist of the 20th century. He passed away at his home in Germany on December 7, 2007, at the age of 79. Stockhausen was a controversial 20th-century composer who had a huge influence on the entire post-war field of serious music creation. Stockhausen was born in 1928 in Murderat, near Cologne, to a family of primary school teachers. His father is a teacher, and his mother is an amateur pianist and singer. He started learning piano at the age of six, and later studied violin and oboe. His father joined the Nazi Party, so his family suffered little harm from Nazism until Hitler replaced the Catholic worship of God with a cult of personality. The young Stockhausen kept his religious beliefs secret, especially when he witnessed firsthand the heavy toll of war in lives as a hospital stretcher bearer in 1944. In 1945, when he was 14 or 5 years old, Stockhausen's worldview and artistic outlook were deeply influenced by his experience of the Nazi dictatorship and the destruction of cultural ideology. In the winter of 1949-1950, Stockhausen's studies had reached a level where he could analyze and understand the works of modern music masters such as Hindemith and Stravinsky, but when he discovered Schoenberg, It was catching up with the anti-tonal trend in the Cologne Music School. It was not until he transferred to Frank Martin's composition class that he received the encouragement that led him to complete a thesis on Bartók. This breakthrough opened the way to a summer seminar in Darmstadt in 1951, where he met the young composer Karel Guerwierz. At that time, Guyewilz was fascinated by the theory just launched by Messiaen, which explained music as a rational process and combined all components of the work, such as notes (treble, high intensity, timbre, duration, etc.) Constructing them separately; not subordinating them to a theme, as in the previous form, but reuniting them in a way, even mathematically. This amazingly logical creative method soon became an important part of the creative philosophy of composers such as Ligeti and Boulez. In 1951, he participated in the Darmstadt New Music Summer School, received guidance from Messiaen and others, and got acquainted with the music theorist and composer H.Eimert, who founded the Cologne Southwest German Music School. Radio Electronic Music Production Room strongly recommends Stockhausen's early works. This was an important step for him to break away from the constraints of the twelve-tone system founded by Schoenberg and Webern and adapt to the evolutionary requirements of the new post-war musical aesthetics. This also occupied a central position in Stockhausen's own creation. At the end of 1951, Stockhausen married Doris Andrea and completed a work that satisfied him, the chamber music "Cross Game", which showed that he moved towards serialism. In early 1952, Stockhausen entered the Paris Conservatoire to further his studies with Messiaen and Milhaud, and studied at the Concrete Music Production Studio founded by P. Schaeffer. He returned to Cologne in 1953 and worked in the electronic music production studio of Westdeutsche Radio. During this period, he studied information theory and phonetics at the University of Bonn. Since 1953, he has taught at Darmstadt Summer School, Basel Conservatoire, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and other institutions. In 1963, he founded the Cologne New Music Training Class, which was later renamed the "Cologne New Music Academy". Since 1958, he has gone to various parts of the world to conduct and perform his works and hold academic seminars every year, thus winning many followers. In 1970, he performed his own work at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan, for several hours every day for one hundred and eighty-three days. In 1971, he became professor of composition at the Cologne Conservatoire and soon became an academician of the Hamburg Academy of Arts. In 1974, he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, and in 1982, he won the German Record Award of the year. Stockhausen is one of the most important exponents of modern electronic music. Since the 1950s, he has been committed to creating a so-called "space music" composed of pure sound waves in electronic music production studios. It is a sound that “brings relationships through music between the inhabitants of Earth and the inhabitants of other planets.” Its production process is roughly as follows: first change the frequency (pitch) and timbre of the tone generated by the oscillator, "then record the sound on tape, and then use the echo effect and double-track technology to analyze and edit."

Because the composition process of this music is very complicated and the series combination is too mechanical, it is difficult for listeners to grasp this kind of works, so they are often ignored. After nearly ten years of exploration, Stockhausen himself also turned to other new creative techniques. His "Cross" for clarinet, bass clarinet, piano and percussion in 1951 (the work caused a riot when it was premiered) and his "Orchestra" in 1952 earned him the most modern music awards The reputation of the representative person. Starting from the small band piece "Counterpoint" from 1952 to 1953, he has broken away from the shackles of pure pointillism music and began to combine musical and non-musical sounds in a so-called "group form". In the wind quintet Zeitmabe of 1955-1956, he combined strictly composed rhythms with various rhythmic freedoms that each performer could express. The structure of Gruppen, composed for three orchestras from 1955 to 1957, was very peculiar. The work was premiered in Cologne in 1958. Maderna, Boulez and Stockhausen conducted three orchestras at the same time. The three bands play independently without interfering with each other. But sometimes they overlap each other at different speeds, and sometimes they respond to each other with questions and answers. The listener now hears music to the left, now to the front, and now to the right, moving from one band to the next as if they were in front of stereo speakers. During the performance, echoes circulate continuously in various parts of the hall, which not only gives people a sense of spatial location, but also makes people realize that it is still an interconnected whole. This sense of space and complex structural form are further reflected in his symphonic music work "Carre" written for four orchestra and four chorus in 1959-1960. In Gesang der Junglinge, a tape music piece created almost at the same time as "Swarm", the above-mentioned sound has a very strong sense of space, and is therefore regarded as an important work of the above-mentioned three-dimensional "space music". In it, Stockhausen combines complex electronic vocalizations with children's voices singing biblical lyrics. This broke through for the first time the limitation of using only purely electronic synthetic sound materials in tape music. In the work "Contact" Kontakte created in 1958-1959, he mixed various electronic sounds with music from piano and some percussion instruments. In response to this extreme sound tape music, he created an instrumental piece in 1964 Mikrophonie I, in which a variety of different materials are used to make the sound of the gong, and through the action of microphones, filters, adjusters and other instruments, the sound is strengthened, weakened or changed. , resulting in an extreme sound structure. In the 1966 audiotape work Telemusik, electronic sounds were combined with recordings of traditional music from different countries and continents. In the "Hymn" created in 1966-1967, certain national anthems were combined with some transformed folk music and jazz music. In "Sirius" from 1975 to 1977, he combined electronic sound with soprano, bass, trumpet, clarinet and other performances. Stockhausen's attempts at change in electronic music are also reflected in his instrumental and vocal works. The most typical work is "Momente" written from 1962 to 1964 and premiered in 1965. This is a piece of music written for soprano, four choirs and thirteen solo instruments, but it is not a fixed work with a specific beginning, musical form and end. There are various conditions to express it, and the playing time can be long or short. This work fully reflects Stockhausen's efforts to eliminate the gap between vocal music and instrumental music, sound and silence, music and noise, and break the dualistic writing method. Some people call this type of work "accidental music". Later, he continued various experiments and related them to other factors: harmony, rhythm and melodic shape were combined with lyrics and scenes, allowing the latter to interpret music from a non-musical perspective. That is to say, sound, language and environment tend to be unified.

From the 1970s, works in this area include "Mantra" for two electric pianos in 1970, "Inori" for orchestra and prayers in 1974, and "Inori" for four performers. "Autumn Song" Herbstmusik, as well as "Zodiac" Tierkreis and suite "Light" Licht written for vocal music and various instruments in 1975-1976. Stockhausen has studied a lot of folk music and tribal music in Africa, Asia and other places. From the second half of the 1960s, he created a number of works deeply influenced by these, and therefore proposed the creation of Regarding the issue of "world music", he believed that, just like in other fields, "the boundaries in the field of music must also be broken...towards integration", and he demanded the creation of an "artificial new folk music" in which the world Various styles are integrated to form "the most inhabited form of world culture", that is, "world music". Many theorists hold objections to Stockhausen's "world music" view, but this trend of creative thought still has a certain influence on some European and American composers today. As a composer, Stockhausen mainly based on sequence music. Through continuous exploration and experimentation, he opened up new ways of music creation, and thus became a very influential figure in the musical life of the world today. As of 1976, several music theorists had written biographical monographs on him. Stockhausen also enjoys a high international reputation as a pianist and conductor. In addition, he also wrote a large number of music papers. By 1978, he had published four volumes of his essays on electronic music and modern music from 1963 to 1977. Stockhausen remains important today because many of his conceptual and musical works are still considered contemporary art. This is despite the understatement that his ideas were probably well ahead of his audience's. His hybridization of world music is as fresh to today's listeners as it was when it first emerged in the 1970s, and his attempt to penetrate the core of sound - in order to accurately assess the meaning of sound's existence (whether it is within a given structure, or deliberately performed without a sense of unity), undoubtedly laid the foundation for the musical practice that has emerged in the past decade. It is not yet possible to summarize his contribution to the music of this century, especially since it is still continuing, but his place in post-war music is unrivaled.