Introduction

Karlheinz Stockhausen was the leading German figure dominating the international new music scene during the period when Cage started to become known outside the United States. He was born near Cologne in 1928 and lost both his parents during World War II, when his life was seriously disrupted. In 1951 he graduated with a degree in music education from the Cologne Musikhochschule and went to the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt. These courses were started by Wolfgang Steinecke in 1946 to feature the leading European modernist composers, and Darmstadt would become an important base for Stockhausen. In 1952 he went to Paris to study with Messiaen. There he met Boulez and worked at the studio for musique concrète run by Pierre Schaeffer. On returning to Cologne the following year, Stockhausen joined the Electronic Music Studio at Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, directed by Herbert Eimert, and he also studied phonetics and communications theory with Werner Meyer-Eppler at Bonn University. By the late 1950s Darmstadt had become the principal focus for the European avant-garde, with Stockhausen as its leading protagonist.

In 1987, looking back at his twenty-one years of teaching at Darmstadt, Stockhausen told Richard Dufallo how he had supported the American composers of the New York School: “I really fought for the invitation of Cage, Brown, Wolff, Feldman to Darmstadt… . I said, ‘If you do not invite (for example) Cage, then I will not come again.’ And, as a matter of fact, it was the only year I did not go because of this problem. After that Cage and Tudor were invited.” This was in 1958 when there was a gap because Boulez cancelled. Tudor realized that Stockhausen then “surpassed Boulez as a power in Europe” and told Joan Peyser: “If the truth were known, it was Stockhausen who turned the tide. If ever a question of negation came up, Stockhausen came to our aid.” Richard Rodney Bennett, a pupil of Boulez, observed Cage's impact at Darmstadt: “Until then the school was serially oriented. Serial plans and charts were everywhere. Cage preached a different doctrine. It was so striking. He shook people awfully. Everyone started to think his way. His became the forthcoming style. Stockhausen went absolutely overboard. And almost everyone went along with Stockhausen.”