Karlheinz Lithr's Accomplishments

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a famous composer, born on August 22, 1928. He also advanced in becoming a pioneer of electronic music. It all started at age seven he had started to learn how to play piano under Franz- Josef Kloth who was a protestant organist of the Altenberg Cathedral. His mother, Gertrude Stockhausen had some rights as being a singer but was confined to a mental hospital in 1933. In between the years 1941-1942 she was murdered by Nazis, after unfortunately at an sanatorium where she was confined at. As for his father Simon Stockhausen, he was a school master that served 5 years in the army but died between the years 1944-1945 on the Hungarian front. When he started attending Xanten, a state school, where he was able to continue

Seven years later in 1977 he started working on “Litcht” his amazing project took him 25 years to finish and in English it was called (Light : Seven days of the week”). Light is a major musical project piece by Stockhausen that requires seven operas. The seven operas are for each day of the week which represents a planet for instance they say “Monday is represented by the moon, Tuesday is representing Mars, Wednesday represents Mercury, Thursday is Jupiter, Friday is Venus, Saturday is Saturn and Sunday it stand for the sun”. “Litcht” contains over 20 musicians, specifically 14 solo voices, six instrumental soloists, one mime, children’s choir, and six synthesizers in the orchestra. One of the most interesting Quartets was the Helicopter Quartet called “Mittwoch”. This made Litcht the major attention grabber for the English Press in the

What’s unique about “Kontakte” is how it was created before synthesizers and digital computers. Not only that but the devices used to create Kontakte wasn’t supposed to be used for music but for testing and maintenance in the radio stations. The devices gave Kontakte a unique two piece version; electronic music by its self and then the second version include electronic music, percussion and piano. “Kontakte” in English means Contact, the word contact meaning the connection between pure electronic sound and the world of acoustics. During this time he discovered that the clicks merge together when the speed of the electronic pulse increases creating a note of a definite pitch, showing him that faster speed presents higher pitch. You can hear this happen in the first 17 minutes in to “Kontakte”.

His influences were not only the events that made an impact on him but encounters with Japanese culture highly influenced Stock’s music and with respect to how time is used. Stock’s music definitely represent the contemporary classical music period being that he is pioneer of electronic music and composer that composed over 300 pieces of music. Stockhausen also consider experimenting with spatial music such as sounds in physical space for compositions. For example (“Kontakte”