[From my hard disk I've excavated some Stockhauseniana I put together in 1998, which has definitely not lost its relevance to this inordinately intricate personality:]

Although Karlheinz Stockhausen at 70 has probably become globally the most famous living German composer (his only rival: Hans Werner Henze), comparatively few people actually know his music.  During the early years after World War II he quickly attained rank with France’s Pierre Boulez and Italy’s Luigi Nono in the triumvirate that dominated avant-garde music, and half a century later his music remains almost as thorny and problematical as ever.

Time has made Stockhausen ever more reticent to discuss personal matters, so only in early biographical writings does one find details of a cripplingly traumatic childhood.  With few interruptions, he has spent his entire life in Germany’s Rhineland, where his parents came from farming stock.  By Karlheinz’s birth in 1928, his father had become a grammar-school teacher, but five years later (coincidentally the year Hitler’s Nazis came to power) his mother became incurably psychotic, committed to an institution from which she never emerged: the Nazis’ cynically misnamed “euthanasia” program murdered her eight years later.  At 13 he lost his father to the Wehrmacht – also never to return, officially missing in action, reportedly killed in Hungary.  At 13 Karlheinz entered a boarding school run by an institution in Xanten that trained teachers according to Nazi principles, which they undoubtedly force-fed him.

At six he had started piano lessons; in Xanten he also got instruction in violin and played oboe in the school orchestra.  He attended that school until 1944, when he got assigned to a field hospital at the front where he served as a stretcher-bearer until March 1945.  After World War II ended, he became a farmhand, but by the end of 1945 busied himself rehearsing amateur operetta productions, studying Latin at the same time.  In February 1946 he entered a Classically oriented Gymnasium in Bergisch Gladbach, and in March 1947 completed his Abitur (approximate equivalent of a U.S. junior college diploma).  He supported himself partially as a bar pianist, partially as an operetta rehearsal pianist.  At 19 he gained admission to Cologne’s outstanding Musikhochschule (conservatory), where his teachers included Switzerland’s Frank Martin – an influence one would never guess from the music Stockhausen soon started composing.  Simultaneously he studied philosophy, musicology, and German studies at Cologne University. Ever since, Cologne has remained the place most closely associated with Stockhausen and his activities.

   His earliest works date from 1950, his first marriage (which produced his first four children) from 1952, but his first musical epiphany came when he discovered the music of Olivier Messiaen, a devoutly Roman Catholic Parisian organist-composer early recognized as a post-war avant-garde pioneer.  Already Stockhausen had started composing “pointillistic” music, consisting of myriad individual, seemingly unrelated tones.  In 1952 he went to Paris for rhythmic and aesthetic training with Messiaen, also dabbling in the semi-electronic musique concrète composed by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer from material tape-recorded from almost infinitely varied sources.  Already in 1952 Vienna’s Universal-Edition, the uniquely adventurous publisher of a modern élite including Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, Weill, et al., had signed Stockhausen to a contract any young composer would almost have died for.

In 1953 he joined the trailblazing new Electronic Studio established by Cologne Radio, which he headed from 1963 to 1977. His first major international breakthrough came in 1965, when he electrified the musical avant-garde with a work he called “Song of the Youths in the Fiery Furnace”.  Previously he had horrified Pierre Boulez with his expressed hope to compose an electronic mass for Cologne’s cathedral; after administrators there told him thanks but no thanks, that project became the world’s first generally acknowledged masterpiece of electronic music, the “Song of the Youths”.  Ever the insatiable experimenter, he also investigated the possibilities of new music’s aleatory pioneers, who introduced the element of chance into a work’s performance, theoretically making each and every performance of an aleatory score unique.  Between 1954 and 1956 Stockhausen continued his studies in phonetics and communication research with a pioneering professor at Bonn University.

Two avant-garde musical events in postwar Germany set the international pace: a cosmopolitan summer school sponsored by Darmstadt and a jampacked weekend festival in Donaueschingen, which continued a tradition that had called early attention to composers including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.  By 1953, the Boulez-Nono-Stockhausen troika unassailably dominated Darmstadt, where Stockhausen taught from 1953 to 1974.  Universal-Edition added him to the editorial staff of its pace-setting journal Die Reihe (“The Row”, named after Schoenberg’s trailblazing principle of the twelve-tone “row”), a post he held from 1954 to 1959.

The world premiere of his super-aleatory “Piano Piece XI” in New York created a major esoteric musical sensation in 1957, and a year later he gave thirty-two concert-lectures at U.S. universities – the beginning of a more or less constant series of Stockhausen concerts over which he himself presides.  The University of Pennsylvania brought him to Philadelphia as a guest professor in 1965, the University of California at Davis in 1966-67.  In 1967 he married for the second time, the German avant-garde artist Mary Bauermeister, who bore him two more children, the six names of whom include Julika, Majella, and Suja.  (The more conventional others: Christel, Markus, and Simon; four Stockhausen children sometimes participate in paternal performances, most notably Markus, a brilliant trumpet virtuoso.)

Japan’s 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka brought Stockhausen’s finest hour to date when the Federal German government, then in Bonn, government sent him as its official cultural ambassador, climaxed by the global auditorium built to his own specifications for the performance of his own music.

Since 1977 Stockhausen has concentrated on the seven-part cycle he calls “Light”, subtitled “The Seven Days of the Week” – a heptalogy which when finished will dwarf its most massive predecessor, Richard Wagner’s tetralogy “The Nibelung’s Ring”.  By 2002, the date Stockhausen has set himself to complete “Light”, it will consist of seven full-length operas comprising some twenty-four hours of music.

Although a Biblically-based religion pretty much his own has never ceased playing a dominant role in Stockhausen’s life and music, he today marches to his own drummer.  Years ago he answered my question about him as a Roman Catholic with “I try to be”, but he divorced his two wives and today shares his life with two of his main expert performers: Clarinettist Suzanne Stephens (born in Waterloo, Iowa), who teamed up with him in 1976, and Flutist Kathinka Pasveer (born in Zaandam, Holland), who in 1982 made it a menage à trois.  Stockhausen has composed more than forty works for Stephens, plus a number of Pasveer, not to mention quite a number for both ladies together, one of which (“Ave”, a 23-minute duo for basset horn and alto flute – a scene from the “Monday” instalment of “Light”) formed half the birthday program in Cologne’s Philharmonie Monday night [in 1998].

From the beginning, Stockhausen has burned with a hard gemlike flame, with two adjectives – arrogant and messianic – applied to him with noticeable frequency.  He has a massive, handsome head, and large, burning eyes of an intensity many find intimidating. Two vertical furrows frame the bridge of his nose in an almost uninterrupted semi-frown perhaps indicating perpetual deep thought and total seriousness.  He has never suffered fools gladly – a tendency intensified by age, success, fame, and what long since became international cult status.  Even before Woodstock he had captured the attention and admiration of at least half the Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney), who included his portrait in the montage of their personal heroes on the cover of their “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” LP.  Others on the record as Stockhausen fans include not only deadly serious young composers all over the world but also David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, and Frank Zappa.

Stockhausen’s acolytes hang upon his every word as the divinely revealed truth, slavishly carrying out his every instruction, no matter how seemingly incomprehensible.  In 1970 he began composing what he calls “cosmic music”, with an almost hour-long “Mantra” for two pianos, percussion, and electronic tape he describes thus: “The unifying construction of Mantra is a musical miniature of the unifying macrostructure of the cosmos, and it is at the same time an enlargement into the acoustic time-field of the unifying microstructure of the harmonic vibrations within the tone itself.”  That typifies Stockhausen in one of his simpler, more lucid descriptions.  Stephen Hawking’s book A Short History of Time enthralled him; so did the Hubble space telescope, which from space has yielded photographs Stockhausen calls “the most beautiful I have ever seen as stars – and for me, tones are stars.”

In 1971 Stockhausen composed a large outdoor work he called Sternklang (Starsound), and in its text referred to inhabitants of other stars, other galaxies, and his wish “to bid them welcome”.  As a gift to the USA for its 1976 bicentennial, the West German government commissioned a work Stockhausen entitled “Sirius”, an electronic opus involving four soloists, and since then Sirius – the brightest star in the heavens at certain times – has figured in writings both by and about Stockhausen.

Berlin Critic Volker Straebel quotes Stockhausen as claiming to have received his musical training on Sirius, cautiously adding that “such utterances soon made him suspect for intellectual discourse”.  Another Berlin critic, Gottfried Krieger, who opened his 70th-birthday laudatio with the question “Is this man crazy?”, lists some of the epithets frequently applied to him: a charlatan, a sect priest, characterized by traits associated with fascism, anthroposophy, and what hip Germans call Esoterik – the equivalent of the USA’s “New Age” movement.  Krieger continues: “Small wonder for someone who gives Sirius as his homeland.” Working on “Light” has led Stockhausen to a sort of overall plan he describes as a “superformula”, and once he has the days of the week polished off, he talks – always with his customary all-out enthusiasm – about going on to compose the individual hour, also the individual minutes, into what Krieger calls “a sort of structure in which the listener can assemble the most varied sonic seconds.  If that is crazy, then Stockhausen is surely crazy.”(Few writers go that far in even hinting at Stockhausen’s genetic maternal heritage.)

In 1969, Stockhausen broke away from Universal-Edition and set up his very own publishing house in the hilltop house he and his family occupy in little suburban Kürten, a forty-minute drive away from Cologne.  Its catalogue manifests awesome marketing techniques of not only printed scores but also compact discs, some in multi-disc sets – even Swiss-made music boxes: Stockhausen, long fascinated by not only legitimate astronomy but also the Zodiac, has composed a little sort of jingle for each sign, and for his 70th birthday Suzanne Stephens arranged a numbered Swiss music-box edition limited to forty of each, bearing the master’s notation of the tune with his signature, available until the end of 1998 for 495 Deutschemarks (c. $275), after that for 560 (c. $310).

[Here, dearly beloved, endeth our Stockhausen text for today.  Shall I continue? - because I can. . . .]

Howard Pollack’s 690-page biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man documents in some detail (the index cites me seven times) one of my life’s most enriching friendships with that almost saintly man, which began soon after I emerged from the University of Texas at 19 as a brand-new Bachelor Musicae and returned to New York (where I’d previously spent a teen-age year at Juilliard until the money ran out) armed with a letter of introduction from another Aaron, the university’s Prof. Schaffer, Ph. D., chairman of the Department of Romance Languages, whom Copland identified to me as a lifelong friend and the first person to whom Copland as a mere boy had confided his ambition to become a composer.

My birthplace El Paso, Texas, where I spent the first sixteen years of my life, afforded rather restricted access to “classical” music of any kind, but the indulgent staff of the Tri-State Music Company contributed to my musical development more than any of them could ever know by permitting me to spend hours and hours in one of their two listening rooms, where I subjected their 78-rpm recordings on the Victor Red Seal label – the only label with an El Paso outlet – to the punitive friction of that era’s steel needles. Those life-sustaining treats included a two-disc album containing Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony recording of El Salón México, a title that immediately found resonance in me since from El Paso you could go to Mexico by simply walking across the bridge over the pusillanimous trickle bearing the grandiose Spanish name for Great River.

Since I knew nothing about that piece’s composer except for a mention I’d read somewhere of one of his earliest piano pieces, “The Cat and the Mouse”, I looked at the two syllables of his surname and for some time after that thought of him as the man with the funny name that combined Cop and Land. After our friendship years later got off the ground, I asked him one day how come people didn’t at least pronounce it the way it looked. He said he had no idea how that had happened, especially in view of its original pronunciation in Russia before the arrival of his immigrant parents. He then told me that story – which I’ve never, anywhere, seen in print, so this little footnote on the most recognized of all American composers of “classical” music might well qualify as a modest world premiere.

Both his parents had come from their native Russia – and heaven alone knows how his father came by his American name Harris Morris Copland, but probably through the same primitive linguistic Americanization that gave birth to that odd surname Copland.

They arrived, conventionally for that day, at Ellis Island, bearing the only documentation they had – naturally in Kyrillic letters, which might as well have confronted the Immigration official who processed them with similar documentation in Arabic or Chinese. He got it across to them that he wanted to know their surname, then wrote down, for all time, what his American ears heard: cop + land. Only some time later did it transpire that by rights he ought to have given them American documents with the correct transliteration Kaplan. One can only speculate as to whether a Jewish boy from Brooklyn named Aaron Kaplan would have had the exalted career Aaron Copland did.

At Stephen F. Austin High School in El Paso, my beloved music teacher Miss Congdon had a small collection of rolls for the upright Duo Art player piano that included one that introduced me to the American pianist George Copeland (1882 – 1971), an early champion of Debussy and the rest of the French school; over and over and over I listened in fascination to the pathetically inadequate Duo Art roll of George Copeland’s playing a piano transcription of Debussy’s orchestrally opulent “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’”. Naturally I eventually asked Aaron Copland whether any kind of family tie connected him with the considerably more famous pianist, and that question yielded me another biographical footnote.

In Aaron Copland’s early thirties, he had become fascinated by Mexico and the other Latin-American countries, and had also acquired considerable fluency in Spanish. When Washington belatedly woke up to the practical strategic importance of its southern neighbors and initiated what it called the Good-Neighbor Policy, with Nelson Rockefeller in charge, the prominent American artists they sent down there understandably included Copland.

He said that in one of the South American countries he visited, he had found himself received with noticeable apprehension, and after a certain amount of discreet prying he found out why. The pianist George Copeland had preceded him there, on a concert tour, and had run afoul of the local fuzz on what those days’ terminology euphemized as a morals charge. Once Aaron Copland convinced them that the two surnames did not coincide even in their spelling, they eventually relaxed and that State Department assignment proved one of quite a number of valuable diplomatic successes.

I cannot conclude this mini-memoir without adding what Germans call a drop of (presumably dry) vermouth. During those hideous years when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s pathological fear of communism held the entire country in thrall, Henry Luce’s second magazine “Life” published a two-page compendium of what it carefully called “Communist Dupes and Fellow Travellers”, punctiliously avoiding calling them flat-out communists, since New York state law made such unsubstantiated labelling punishable unless the accuser could prove actual Party membership. Those pages included tiny mugshots of such dangerous limbs of the red Soviet Satan as Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, and . . . Aaron Copland.

The next time I saw Aaron after that, I asked him what effect he expected that to have for him in practical terms. With a rueful smile he said only that he hardly imagined the State Department would send him on any more of those wonderful junkets – and, as far as I know, it never did.