Friday, December 7, 2007

Karlheinz Stockhausen R.I.P.


I am going to tell myself that yesterday's invoking the name of Henry Flynt, a vocal opponent of Stockhausen's, even to the point of picketing performances of his, did in no way bring about the influential (Miles Davis, Bjork, Herbie Hancock, Sonic Youth to name a few) and contraversial (he was the guy who referred to 9/11 as "works of art", later clarifying that he meant as Lucifer's greatest works of art, not really helping his case all that much) compser's demise.
However you regard(ed) him, or even if you didn't regard him at all, Stockhausen was a badass - a collosus from the era of giant revolutionary art/thinkers, creating works requiring new methods of listening as well as new ways of hearing, crafting works of staggering scope, particulalry his pieces for string players in helicopters hoverig over a field or his multi-day long opera Licht which is slated to see its first full performance in 2008. Few artists or composers today are willing to take on convetional thinking and notions of scale the way he could.

The video below is not by the composer, but uses his Kontakte, one of his more famous pieces as its soundtrack

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