R.I.P. Karlheinz Stockhausen

The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died Wednesday, December 5 at his home in Germany at age 79. He composed 362 individually performable works, including his 1966 "Telemusik," an early influential transmission art work.

Composed in Tokyo in the electronic studio of Japanese Radio NHK. Stockhausen used shortwave radio transmissions to compose a work with which he wanted, "to take a step further in the direction of composing not ‘my’ music but a music of the whole Earth, of all countries and races." While Telemusik incorporates sounds from many countries including Japan, Sahara, Bali, Vietnam, China, the Amazons, Spain, and Hungary, Stockhausen does not consider this work to be a collage, but "Rather—through the process of intermodulation between old ‘found’ objects and new sound events which I made using modern electronic means—a higher unity is reached: a universality of past, present and future, of distant places and spaces: TELE-MUSIK." Telemusik consists of 32 structures (moments) incorporating shortwave radio transmissions. Additional equipment used for the realization of the electronic music was two beat frequency oscillators, three sine-wave generators, one delta generator, one function generator, one transposing tape recorder with a pilot frequency generator, two tape recorders, one amplitude modulator, two ring modulators, three high-pass and low-pass filters, one third-octave filter, one six-track tape recorder.