Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - 2007)

Introduction
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a german composer who was one of the most important, but also controversial, composers of his time. His career spanned from the 20th into the early parts of the 21st century. He also was one of the main theorists behind the concepts of electronic music. His music is serial in style, but the concepts he looked into with his approach to music was revolutionary, and very influential for avant garde composers to come after him. His studies of music dove deeper into psychology and acoustics of the music he was creating.

Work Analysis
The work I thought was the most interesting from Stockhausen was Oktophonie. This was a piece created in 1990-1991. It is very interesting, playing with many different aspects of music like panning, and other electronic music effect. The piece overall has a very ambient sound that at the same time is very eerie and off-putting. This piece uses those concepts of panning and reverb to create a three-dimensional song space. Stockhausen also used the concept of micro-composition in this piece. Micro-composition is where instead of thinking of each sound as a whole, he would take a sample of a few different textures and pitch and use those together to create a very complex polyphonic texture. This piece, when looked at from the different sound sources, has 8 different lines going on at the same time. This way of composing music is actually very easy to process and understand how it came to be. It is very simplistic in what it is trying to do and is long enough to give the listener enough time to process what is going on.

Comparisons
I would compare this to Star-Child. The ambient nature of both of these pieces make them both very similar. They both have a lot going on but what is going on is stretched out over a long period of time. The entire would of electronic music is what mainly has influenced Stockhausen's compositional style. You can tell from his music that a lot of what he does is experimenting with what can be achieved by electronic means and using that to develop or create a story. In this case this piece actually goes through a story of a war, with missiles and bombs exploding in the background while chaos ensues in the foreground.

Observations
This specific piece really appealed to my interest, considering I have already gone through the Electronic Music series. This specific piece makes you really appreciate where music is today, without these experiments with a three-dimensional space created just by listening to the music we would not have those ideas fleshed out in our music of today. You can hear the influence and perk of using spacial elements in the music, it gives the listener a physical connection to what is going on in the music around them.