Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen’s compositional work has made the use of formulas, derivations of form, and various degrees of perfection accessible for the first time. Historically, there have been composers who dealt with similar issues (Beethoven, Wagner, Schönberg), but their results remain shrouded in obscurity. The discussion here is not about how one personally chooses to engage with art—whether in hidden or open forms (a decision we cannot make now)—but I know of no music today that is as transparently clear in its structures, from their prerequisites and transformations to their deconstruction, as Stockhausen’s.

How something becomes, how it exists, how it passes away—without being didactically presented, but by allowing participation in its being and passing—can hardly be composed with greater clarity than in Stockhausen’s work, such as in “Inori.” The parameters do not come from outside the music but emerge from within, bringing the music forth from its core. Rhythm gives rise to timbre, timbre to harmony, until the overall shape is present in the individual tone from which it originated. This way of thinking, this enhanced capacity for thought, is unimaginable without the development of electronic music, where composition in sound enriches or even replaces the composition with tones. Stockhausen’s pioneering achievements in this field have already made it possible to speak of the classical period of electronic composition.