Meister of the modern

Karlheinz Stockhausen, the great pioneer of electronic music, is 70. Michael White celebrates an extraordinary life and oeuvre

A few years ago in Holland, the members of a string quartet appeared on a concert platform, took their opening bow, and promptly left the building. Carrying their instruments, they then climbed into waiting helicopters - one per player - and spent the next half-hour circling, airborne, around Amsterdam. Meanwhile, back at base, their audience sat in respectful silence, watching the proceedings on a bank of TV screens. Hard as it is to play a cello in a helicopter, this was a recital: the world premiere of a piece specifically written for performance several hundred feet above ground. The aerial interpreters were the Arditti Quartet, boldly going - as they always do - where others have neither the technique nor the inclination. And the composer was Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose declared objective was to give his score a head-start in its voyage home. Home was Sirius, the star which he had recently revealed to be his place of birth. No doubt it features on his passport.

Critical responses to the Helicopter Quartet were understandably bemused. It was a crazy piece, non-practical and virtually non-productive. Worse still, it provided further evidence of what appeared to be a loosening grip on sanity: the meister of the European avant-garde had finally flipped his lid. And that suspicion has survived to haunt the celebrations for Stockhausen's 70th birthday, which fell in August but hasn't been observed with the wealth of international acclaim you might expect for someone of his stature. A composer hailed by Messiaen in the 1950s as the future of modern music; a composer so widely influential through the 1960s that his image appears on the cover of the Sgt Pepper album; and a composer once honoured by Deutsche Grammophon with a compilation disc of his Greatest Hits. Who else in the contemporary avant-garde has "Hits" to compile?

In fact, the briefest resume of his creative life builds into a portrait of one of the supremely innovative minds of the century; and if his projects have strayed from the safe havens of reason and practicality, their very craziness has breached conceptual limitations in the open-ended way that pioneering abstract thought often does. Clearing the path that others tarmacadam into usefulness, he has rethought the ground rules of musical composition, tracing the process back to the fundamentals of how sound is produced, sent and received. He has pioneered the idea of space as a critical element in performance. He has explored and exploited - like no one else - electronic technology as a means to music. And alongside his technical preoccupations, he has maintained a mystic- spiritual motivation, expressed in vast works which attempt to recreate in sound the actuality of the universe. Their culmination is a huge cycle of seven operas - one for each day of the week, not yet completed. It's called Licht, and it amounts to a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk: a total, all- embracing artwork like a latter-day Ring cycle (though bigger). And comparisons with Wagner are justified. Not least in terms of the monumental egocentricity which both composers share. If Stockhausen's music recreates the universe, there's no doubt that it's a universe with Stockhausen at its centre. He is not short of self-belief.

Born near Cologne in 1928, he was the child of a depressive mother, institutionally murdered under the Nazi policy of killing off the mentally unstable, and a father who was killed in battle. The war left him traumatised by adolescent service as a stretcher-bearer, and penniless. He earned money by playing the piano in bars and accompanying a travelling magician - an experience which, critics might say, gave him a lingering taste for theatrical trickery.

But a more serious influence from that time was the music of Webern: microscopically controlled and perhaps an odd starting point for a composer whose trademark would become massivity, but attractive to Stockhausen for its serial process - the organisation of pitches into 12-note rows - rather than its scale of operation. From Webern he graduated to Messiaen, who had extended the 12-note idea into a form of "total" serialism whereby everything - duration, rhythm, timbre, as well as pitch - was marshalled into systematic rows. In 1952, he moved to Paris to join Messiaen's classes.

But in Paris his attention was waylaid by something else: musique concrete, the (as it now seems) prehistoric, faltering first steps in electronic composition. It was crude, and so were Stockhausen's initial experiments in the medium - a matter of winding tape around nails in desktops and splicing it with kitchen knives. But in a few years the techniques improved, enormously, and by 1956 he had produced a piece which remains a landmark in the art of electronic writing: a taped reprocessing of a boy's voice called Gesang der Junglinge (1955) which was significant for two reasons. One, it introduced a genuine element of expressivity to what otherwise had been an exercise in engineering. Two, its method of performance - fed through banks of speakers placed around the audience - placed a premium on spatial sound effects.

And spatial wizardry thereafter became an abiding obsession, through a sequence of scores with rapidly growing ambitions. Gruppen (1957), begun around the same time as the Gesang, turned standard concert-hall seating upside down, envisaging an audience placed in the middle of three separate orchestras with three conductors. Carre (1959) used similar surround-sound methods, but with four orchestras, four conductors, four choirs. And by now it was apparent that things were beginning to get out of hand.

But while Stockhausen was emerging as a composer in whose work the epic came as standard and could only be performed on rare occasions in exceptional circumstances, he was also engrossed in another pursuit: of the relationship between prepared electronics and "live" acoustical performance. The Gesang had been a purely electronic piece, completed in the studio with nothing to be added in the process of performing. But in Mikrophonie I (1964) he brought the whole business of electronic creativity out of the studio and into the concert hall - so the sounds were made as the audience heard them, by the manipulation of microphones around a vibrating tam-tam. Mixtur (1964) repeated the idea on a considerably larger scale, substituting a symphony orchestra for the tam-tam and ring-modulators for the microphones. And by the late 1960s, almost everything he was producing involved some kind of marriage between studio technology and live action.

But there was another marriage going on here as well: between the rationality of science, and the supreme irrationality of a composer who had come to believe that he was writing sacred music for some cosmic spiritual order. An early example was Hymnen (1967), a two-hour long collage of bird-song, speech, and 40 examples of the world's national anthems, processed together as a statement of peace and love. Another was the eastern-influenced, meditative Stimmung (1968), in which six amplified voices build harmonic texture out of talismanic words, erotic poetry and a sustained low B. The singers sit, cross-legged in a circle; and the manner of it all suggests a hippie love-in. So does Stockhausen's requirement that "the musicians have an aura which makes you feel that making music is a sacred act with spiritual force. The sounds must be clean, and the performers' souls must be clean when they make the sounds".

From that, it was only a short, cosmic hop to the New Age fantasy of Sternklang (1971) written to be played in open air by moonlight. Five ensembles are arranged at some distance from each other, hidden among bushes. Each has its own musical "module", based on stellar constellations, and as the piece builds up, the modules are exchanged between them by torch-bearing runners. If the men in bushes don't attract the interest of the police, it runs for three hours; and Stockhausen describes it as "a preparation for beings from other stars and for the day of their arrival here". Asked if all this was just a prematurely post- modern joke, he replied: "If these men arrive some day, we will perform Sternklang to show we are informed about their homeland". His face didn't crack.

But on the serious - as opposed to Sirius - side of Stockhausen, his accumulated work has embraced at least one powerful idea. It has pursued and completed the quest of serialism to establish a unity of substance between timbre, pitch and duration. Through his studio experiments and the resulting scores, he has repeatedly shown how these three are just different aspects of the perception of time. Slow down a rhythm and it becomes form, or structure. Speed up the rhythm and it becomes pitch, or texture. With appropriate technology, says Stockhausen, you could condense an entire Beethoven symphony into a two-second duration, and the result would be a sound whose timbre was determined by the form of the original. A fascinating possibility.

Electronic sound has not emerged as the triumphant avant-garde voice it promised to be 30 years ago. But Stockhausen's dependency on it has still grown, to the point where almost every score requires a battery of technological support. Asked if an atomic bomb fell tomorrow and there was no more power supply whether there would be no more Stockhausen, he pointedly deflected the joke. "I do not believe in the atomic bomb," he said. "A higher spirit will protect us."

Stockhausen at 70: QEH, SE1 (0171 960 4242), Wednesday.

Michael White on Wagner: page 6.