So, Karlheinz Stockhausen is dead. This brings to an end an almost totemic symbol of modernism, loved and reviled throughout the musical world. I've had a changeable relationship with his music myself.

I first heard his music at a concert at Middlesbrough Polytechnic in January 1976, when I was 15. And yes, being the sort of bloke I am, I've still got the programme 31 years later-


(Note "Middlesbrough" and "Teesside" both spelt incorrectly!)

The concert was a pretty strange one for me because, until the two live performers came on stage for Stockhausen's "Kontakte", there was nothing to watch - the audience sat in the middle of four speakers and the sounds whirled around them. Before the Stockhausen piece, Ligeti's work "Articulation" was played - in which creepy almost-vocal sounds are generated. I was aware of Ligeti because of his music that appeared in 2001, although this was something else altogether. For Stockhausen's "Kontakte" the "4-channel tape" was joined by percussion and piano (curiously the percussionist, Gary Kettel, turned up ten years later working with another problematic iconoclast, Scott Walker) who gave us a focus of attention as the alien sounds floated around us. About the only other thing I remember from the concert was a group of hippy students behind us who sat giggling throughout and making raspberry noises with their lips...

Their reaction was interesting, as Stockhausen's music was continually being foisted on hippies who were supposed to get his music. The year before, his works "Ceylon" and "Bird of Paradise" were released on the prog label Chrysalis, and I'm the proud owner of "Karlheinz Stockhausen's Greatest Hits" (!) on Polydor, complete with sleevenotes by Jonathan Cott of "Rolling Stone" magazine, and a groovy die-cut sleeve-



As far as I'm aware neither sold very well, and although I remember a fanfare as Chrysalis signed Stockhausen, I'm pretty sure he was quietly dropped a year later. Similarly stories abound of performances of his most "hippy" work, the pseudo-mystic "Stimmung" being ruined by audience members joining in with "meiow" noises - quite literally cat-calling.

So the hippies didn't get Stockhausen, even if they did go to gigs and freak out to those influenced by him - and here his influence is impressive, both Holger and Irmin from Can were students, and Miles Davis in his most intensely experimental period (1969-75) were listening...and it showed. On the other hand he had to put up with the likes of Sir Thomas Beecham, who he was no better than he ought to have been, saying of his music "I trod in some once". I picked up a book from Middlesbrough Library called "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism" by Cornelius Cardew. I didn't understand it of course, although it did lead to an interest in Cardew's music (he was a pupil of Stockhausen's) until I realised that, whilst Stockhausen probably did serve imperialism, Cardew served totalitarianism, which didn't seem much of an improvement.

So Stockhausen's music was quietly ignored for another 15 years or so, until a few Techno DJ's started dropping some of his noises into their sets and everything went mental. I remember seeing a pretty tatty copy of "Stimmung" for sale in a second-hand record shop for £50. Any techno-head daft enough to buy this would have been severely disappointed.

Over the following ten years there was a lot of Stockhausen activity - he started the "Stockhausen Verlag" label to make his music available, although no shop ever sold them because the dealer price was so expensive, he started giving concerts and gnomic interviews.....and I started to go off him. Rather than being a lovable iconoclast like Cage, Stockhausen seemed serious to the point of absurdity - listening only to his own music and disparaging everything else, whilst wasting his time on a virtually unperformable opera of such enormous scale it makes "The Ring" seem like a vignette. "Licht" will take a week to perform. The only other work of note to appear was the ludicrous "Helicopter Quartet" a concept only trounced in awfulness by the music it produced.

Then came September 11th and Stockhausen's comment on the 25th that the attacks were "the greatest work of art imaginable in the whole cosmos!". Concerts were cancelled, people were outraged. Including me. He tried to extricate himself by explaining it was "Lucifer's greatest work of art" - but as the massacre was carried out in the name of religion, this didn't pacify me, and taking a leaf from John Lydon, I made a badge-



..."detourning" a badge from the Sonic Arts Network. I confess I was also influenced by a long history of opposing Stockhausen that predates even Cornelius Cardew-

"Armed with placards bearing the slogan 'FIGHT RACIST MUSIC', Action Against Cultural Imperialism picketed his concert at the Judson Hall, New York, on 8 September 1964" and an attempt to disrupt a performance of his work in Brighton by the Neoist Alliance (see link above)

Stockhausen eventually gave a full apology for his comments, as he should have done, because they were astoundingly stupid.

In 2005 Stockhausen gave a performance in Billingsgate, London, which as far as I know was not picketed by Post-Situationist activists. It did however cost £35 (plus booking fee) to get in and watch the meastro play a few old tapes. I wrote an angry piece about it on my Journal in which I compared him to Pat Robinson and listed all the reasons I thought he was rubbish.

Now I feel a little more sanguine - listening to "Stockhausen's Greatest Hits" again this morning has reminded me that the early electronic pieces are exquisitely spooky, "Carre" and "Telemusik" still sound amazingly contemporary, and "Spiral" is an idea of appealingly lucid simplicity - in fact it's a piece I like so much I once got Mark Wastell to perform it at a "Micro-Classical" night I promoted - something I'm glad to say he did with aplomb. "Gruppen" is still a headache and "Stimmung" is just bloody tedious, though...

And now Stockhausen is dead, and his friends and companions issued this statement-
"On December 5, he ascended with joy through heaven's door in order to continue to compose in paradise with cosmic pulses in eternal harmony."

hmmm.

The BBC announced his death on their "Entertainment" page.