Karlheinz Stockhausen, 79, had wide influence in pop-music circles

BERLIN — Karlheinz Stockhausen, the avant-garde German composer renowned for his pioneering work in electronic music and who influenced pop musicians from the Beatles to Björk, died after a short illness Friday at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg near Cologne in western Germany.

He was 79.

Mr. Stockhausen was one of the most important and controversial postwar composers, helping to shape a new understanding of sound through electronics and "controlled chance" sounds that led to new styles of computerized and sampled compositions.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon of the Beatles were Stockhausen fans. The single "Strawberry Fields Forever" showed Stockhausen's influence and the group honored the composer by using his image on the cover of its 1967 album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (fifth from the left in the back row).

Frank Zappa and David Bowie have cited him as an influence, and he is also credited with having influenced techno music. Miles Davis and more recently Björk have cited him as a musical influence.

Stockhausen wrote 362 individually performable works, according to his publisher, including more than 140 of electronic or electro-acoustic music, and brought out more than 100 albums.

"Any sound can become music if it is related to other sounds ... every sound is precious and can become beautiful if I put it at the right place, at the right moment," he once said in an interview.

He also said he loved silence.

Early in his career, Stockhausen dabbled in "musique concrete," recording everyday sounds, distorting them electronically and joining them together to form a composition.

Born in 1928 in Burg Modrath, a village near Cologne, Stockhausen said he was badly scarred by his experience of World War II, in which he was a stretcher-bearer.

He played jazz piano to support himself through the Cologne Music School and began to compose, later studying under composers Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen in Paris in the 1950s.

He found his own ways of assembling sounds to form a composition, developing the ideas of an earlier generation of European composers, like Arnold Schoenberg, who composed around a series of sounds instead of developing and repeating a theme.

His breakthrough came in 1956, with the release of "Gesang der Junglinge" (Song of the Youths), which used five sets of strategically positioned loudspeakers to produce a "sonic ballet." In 1960, he released "Kontakte" (Contacts), one of the first compositions to mix live instrumentation with prerecorded material.

In 1966-67, he served as a guest professor for composition at the University of California, Davis.

In a mix of solo and ensemble music, electronic and concrete techniques together with mime, a key work, "Licht," premiered at Milan's La Scala opera house in 1981, marking Stockhausen's increasing stature in conventional classical circles.

Stockhausen came under fire for comments about the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. He was quoted as saying the strikes were "the greatest work of art imaginable."

"Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert and then dying, just imagine what happened there," he was quoted as saying. He later said he meant that only the devil could have orchestrated the attacks.

Compiled from The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Reuters