Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen

The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen is arguably the greatest living composer of the present day, and unquestionably the most elusive and enigmatic musical thinker of a generation that includes Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Luciano Berio. His radically new electronic and instrumental music converted Igor Stravinsky to serialism in the 1950s, and has continued to inspire young composers for over fifty years.

This present volume draws on over forty years of the author's close study of Stockhausen and functions as a catalogue raisonee of Stockhausen's complete output. With plentiful citations from the history of radio, film, and sound recording, as well as from contemporary science and technology, the book is laid out in strictly chronological order and contains unusually ample commentary on the composer's sources of inspiration. Each composition is also fully documented within the text, giving full information of each work's publisher, catalogue number, instrumentation, duration, and authorized compact disc.
Any listener will benefit from this work and American music lovers in particular will find it an invaluable guide to the ongoing debate and rivalry over the sources of abstract expressionism and the avant-garde.

CONTENIDO

In Place of a Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On Telling the Truth
1.- Formation
2.- Early Works
3.- Polarities
4.- Rhythmic Cells
5.- Music on Tape
6.- Watching Time
7.- Meyer.-Eppler
8.- Temperaments
9.- Aleatory
10.- Revolution
11.- Contacts
12.- Theater
13.- Uncertainty
14.- Process
15.- Anthems
16.- Figures
17.- White Space
18.- Findings
19.- Rites
20.- Stagecraft
21.- Allegories
22.- Mysterium
23.- Donnerstag
24.- Samstag
25.- Montag
26.- Dienstag
27.- Freitag
28.- Mittwoch
29.- Sonntag
Bibliography
Index
About the Author