The flat-pack Stockhausen

One of Karlheinz Stockhausen's most intriguing ideas was for a piece musicians could complete themselves. Christopher Fox took up the composer's self-assembly challengeIn the summer of 1963, Karlheinz Stockhausen came up with a project for a composition class he would teach that autumn. On holiday in Sicily with his lover Mary Bauermeister, he worked out a structure which would involve transformations of seven different kinds of music, explaining later that "as I couldn't take a lot of paper wit...

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