Taking a break from all that music writing for a moment to note the passing one of the most important composers of the 20th century.
I will never forget the feeling the moment Stockhausen clicked for me -- not coincidentally, while watching a lecture of his from 1972 or so. You could make a very good argument that Stockhausen's most lasting influence were those lectures -- not so much the music itself, but how he talked and thought about it. Wearing this dramatic, military-issue pea coat in master-classes delivered in almost superhumanly good English before a few hundred students stroking their beards and hanging on his every word, Stockhausen would expound not just on how he composed his pieces, but on these remarkably transformative ideas that guided that process.
While it's been a decade since I watched them, I can't tell you how powerful those lectures were to me -- when you actually saw how these ideas connected with the construction of the notes on the page (his scores were absolutely gorgeous). No one's work was more rewarding to study -- Klavierstucke III (which runs about thirty seconds) comes to mind as a particularly heady, if austere experience.
It was only later that I learned many of the concepts Stockhausen spoke about in those 1971-72 lectures were, for all intents and purposes, faked -- invented long after he'd composed the pieces they supposedly informed. This "discovery" had the effect of making me always question artists talking about their own work.
But more than that, realizing that Stockhausen--who could "defend" his own works better than any composer in history--was at best exaggerating mightily cast doubt on the whole need for "conceptual integrity" in the first place -- this idea that your work had to have this hyper-logical masterplan at its core. So, a mixed legacy to be sure.
Contemporaneous lecture-cum-peacoat here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIPVc2Jvd0w. Pretty good stuff.
