Karlheinz Stockhausen: Karlheinz Stockhausen, who has died aged 79, was one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music.
He was fond of quoting Blake's lines, "He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity's sunrise"; and like Blake, the pursuit of his vision led him down strange and often awkward paths.
The results earned him a reverence among a cult following unique among 20th-century composers. But they also earned him a fair amount of ridicule. Roger Scruton's memorable judgment, that Stockhausen "is not so much an emperor with no clothing, but a splendid set of clothes with no emperor", sums up the sceptical view, which in Anglo-Saxon countries has become the dominant one since the 1970s.
When Stockhausen was an 18-year-old music student in war-devastated Cologne, he read Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. This crystallised the conviction that "the highest calling of mankind can only be to become a musician in the profoundest sense; to conceive and shape the world musically". Stockhausen had reason enough to avert his eyes from the world as it was. His early life was tormented. When he was six, his mother had been taken into an asylum. She was later killed, a victim of the Nazis' enforced euthanasia policy. Meanwhile, his father had become an enthusiastic Nazi and fought on the eastern front where he went missing, presumed dead.
Stockhausen recalled how as a boy he heard marching songs played on the radio, an experience that left him with a hatred of regular, repetitive rhythms in music. Not all his early experiences were negative ones. He was impressed by the Catholic ritual of rural Germany; the Easter procession of young girls was recalled, 45 years later, in Act 2 of Montag, one of the cycle of seven linked music dramas named Licht (Light) to which Stockhausen devoted the last third of his life.
What is often forgotten in the noisy polemics around Stockhausen is the fact that his visions were put into practice in his 362 individually performable works with a colossal speculative and practical intelligence, which earned him the respect of musicians as diverse as Boulez and the Beatles.
Stockhausen was fortunate in that his speculative turn of mind, and his impatience with inherited forms and vocabulary caught the mood of the times. Although the Stockhausen of the 1980s seemed a lonely figure, he was not so in the 1950s. Then he was just one of many idealistic young composers determined to rework the language of music from scratch. They were all self-confident, and scorned their elders - except for Anton Webern and Oliver Messiaen - a stance that nowadays seems astonishing.
Messiaen's experiments in extending arithmetical forms of organisation beyond pitch, to embrace rhythm, timbre and dynamics, confirmed Stockhausen in his belief that this was the way forward. But over the next few years he was to take the serial ideas into wholly new areas. Several key works of the 1950s, all since confirmed as classics, found a new way of utilising the serial idea in which the elements to be organised were no longer "points", but groups of variable length, each defined by certain overall features such as speed, density and range.
His most famous (and some would say best) piece, Gruppen, has a marvellous exuberance in which fantasy and rigour feed off one another.
By this time Stockhausen had already become the acknowledged leader in what was then a fledgling medium, electronics. In the threadbare studio of the Paris Technical College he worked on a new dream. "I now wanted a structure, to be realised in an étude, that was already worked into the micro-dimension of a single sound, so that in every moment, however small, the overall principle of my idea would be present."
Stockhausen's music contains some of the great, defining aural images of 20th-century music, on a par with the flute that opens Debussy's L'après-midi d'un faune or the upward swoop that ends Schönberg's Erwartung. Take, for example, the closing pages of Gruppen, where apocalyptic brass chords are teased from one orchestra to another over the listener's head; or the moment in Kontakte where an electronic wail descends into the depths and turns magically into a series of pulses. This amazing piece was created by the same laborious cut-and-splice techniques which had left critics so unimpressed in 1951. Only eight years later, they yielded what is still felt to be a masterpiece of the electronic medium.
That Stockhausen could achieve such a result with such primitive means (as they now seem), in the face of scepticism, hostility and incomprehension is a tribute to his strength of character and his unwavering vision. The obvious fact that it could not have been achieved without a high degree of pragmatism, of "making do", is often overlooked. This vision was always allied with the meticulous calculator and the practical musician and studio technician.
Taken as a whole, Stockhausen's achievement must be the most fertile in ideas, if not of perfectly achieved works, of any composer of the 20th century. Those ideas are strenuous, boldly speculative, and high-minded in a way that does not really suit our more cautious age.
But when the time to explore and dream comes again, Stockhausen's music will be waiting for it.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: born August 22nd, 1928; died December 5th, 2007