Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen is dead.

I think I was about 21 when I first heard "Kontakte." My roommate Kelly had decided that the Moog synthesizer was just about the coolest thing ever, and badgered me into reading Analog Days, which got me digging into early electronic music (so I could hear what they were talking about). A lot of it was shrill or boring, or just sort of ham-handed. Many of the early electronic "musicians" were innovators in technique and technology, but had no conception of how to make music out of the sounds they were discovering. Stockhausen was different. He was still leaps and bounds away from anything that resembled traditional composition techniques, but that's what made it so interesting. He had created a whole new musical vocabulary, and was using all of the tools at his disposal, all the sounds he was discovering, to rewrite the rules on how music could be built. It may sound crude in comparison to the electronic music that has come since, in a large part thanks to Bob Moog's efforts to make using that technology more accessible. But Stockhausen was there at the beginning, pushing the boundaries as far as he could.

I'm not sure what else to say about him, but I couldn't let it pass without mention. The man reshaped music as we know it, and I want to recognize that.