German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty
News has just reached us that avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen - visionary mage, wayward genius, solo explorer on music's outer limits - has died at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg at the age of 79. Though it's sometimes said that his music was more talked about than listened to, Stockhausen was a last, electrifying connection to the revolutions that pushed 20th-century music into a brave, sometimes alien new age.
Stockhausen's influence on musicians as wildly different as Mingus and Kraftwerk, the Beatles to Björk, speaks for itself. So too does his restless creativity, which surely puts him on a par with the greatest of composers: whether it was writing a quartet for multiple helicopters or coaxing crackles painstakingly out of magnetic tape, Stockhausen believed with disarming intensity that what he did was the most important thing it was possible to do, that music came before everything else. It's a cliche, maybe, but we are the poorer for his loss.
