Karlheinz Stockhausen

Born in 1928 in Mödrath and died in 2007 in Kürten, Karlheinz Stockhausen grew up in Altenberg, Germany, where he received his first music lessons from the cathedral organist. After the war, during which he was conscripted as a stretcher-bearer, Stockhausen worked at various jobs and studied piano, theory, musicology, philology and philosophy at the Conservatory and University of Cologne. In 1951 he took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses, where he taught from 1953 to 1974. After teaching at the Courses for New Music and then at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Stockhausen went on to teach in Europe, North America and Asia, until he founded the Stockhausen Courses in Kürten in 1998. Up until 1969, his scores were published by Universal Edition (Vienna); later works were published by Stockhausen Verlag, which he founded in 1975 and which published the last volumes of his writings. In 1994 the Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik (Stockhausen Foundation for Music) was founded, an association whose aim is to "promote musicology and the development of musical culture on the basis of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen".