Karlheinz
Stockhausen was a major avant garde composer in post WWII Germany. He is
considered to be one of the heralds of electronic music. His early life is
wrought with tragedy. His mother, a singer in her early life, was committed to
an asylum in 1933 where she later died during the height of the Nazi eugenics
movement. Karlheinz later worked in a military hospital during the war when his
father died in Hungary as a German soldier. He later studied at the Cologne University
of Music and the University of Bonn. While studying in the musical conservatory
at the University of Cologne, Stockhausen developed his radical
reinterpretation of musical sounds that was later typical of a Stockhausen
piece
Stockhausen’s
piece, Kontakte, is characterized by shattering clangs, bangs, bongs, whistles,
and static that all pierce the sonorous space produced within the work. The
amplified reverb produces an aura of spaciousness colored by distorted bouncing
percussive elements that seem to just splat onto the auditory background like a
Pollock piece on canvas. The sounds, while definitely products of the
technological revolution of 20th century, nevertheless emit a sense
of naturalness. At moments, the wobbling distortions coming from Stockhausen’s
electronic manipulations appear as a scene in the woods. One can hear a frog, a
bird’s whistle, and the patter of a woodpecker. These sounds all appear
randomly, which parallels the unpredictability of nature and yet, at the same
time, organizes itself into an organic and aesthetic whole.
