Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen

"German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen is arguably the greatest living composer 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 composers for more than fifty years." "Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen draws on more than forty years of the author's close study of Stockhausen and the sources of his inspiration, while functioning as a catalogue raisonne of Stockhausen's complete output. Maconie wisely avoids technical analysis, focusing instead on the music's aesthetic and practical assumptions. With plentiful citations from the history of radio, film, sound recording, and contemporary science and technology, this book is organized chronologically and contains ample commentary on the composer's sources of inspiration. Each composition is treated on its own terms and also as a piece in a larger puzzle, embracing surrealist art and literature, as well as music. Each composition is fully documented within the text, providing publisher, catalogue number, instrumentation, duration, and authorized compact disc."--BOOK JACKET.