Karlheinz Stockhausen died last year. Even 50 years after his career started in Germany his music is as provoking as ever. Stockhausen hardly is Easy Listening - and many of his ideas will remind you rather of crazy performance art instead of ’serious’ classical music.
But we should never underestimate the impact of Stockhausen - many fellow artists have been inspired by him: Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk (obviously), Björk and the Beatles.
Stockhausen is one of these people who expand the boundaries of of culture further ahead. They add a new noise or new variation to the mix. As with all cultural experiments “they don’t make any sense” - because we often create the “sense” afterwards or it takes other artists to “smooth” the rough edges of the “new idea” and make it more acceptable to the masses.
So here are some of Stockhausen’s innovations and compositions - don’t expect them to be easy on you … 