Cologne, Germany - Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, the controversial German giant of contemporary serious music, has died at the age of 79, his ex-wife Mary Bauermeister and his recording company said Friday. He died after a short illness on Wednesday just outside the western city of Cologne at Kuerten, where he lived and worked. He is to be buried on Thursday with only close family present, the company said.
A pioneer of electronic music, Stockhausen wrote demanding works that played with unfamiliar tones.
Stockhausen was born August 22, 1928 near Cologne and was orphaned as a teenager, with his father killed as a soldier in the Second World War and his mother dying in 1945 in a mental hospital.
He shot to prominence with a choral work in 1951 and went on to compose cutting-edge music and explore unfamiliar 12-tone music.
In 1963 he became head of the electronic-music studio at the public broadcasting corporation in Cologne and was professor of music in the city from 1971 to 1977.
Always controversial, he was rejected by some critics as worthless while being acclaimed by others around the globe as the leading theorist of serious western music of the 20th century.
He became fascinated with Japan and Zen Buddhism and always stressed that the essence of his music was its religious sense.
But his appetite for controversy and his utter focus on art caused embarrassment in 2001 in Germany, when he described the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as the "greatest work of art ever in the whole cosmos."
He founded his own recording company, Stockhausen Verlag, to commercialize sales of printed and recorded versions of his work.
The company said he wrote 362 works in all which are available on a complete collection of 139 compact discs.
It was announced only last month that he was working on a new version of his Zodiac work to celebrate his 80th birthday.
It was commissioned by the Mozart Orchestra of the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna, Italy, and had been set to premiere on September 16, 2008, conducted by artistic director Claudio Abbado, three weeks after the great composer was to turn 80.
Like Stockhausen's earlier Zodiac composition, the new work was to explore the astrological "star signs" of people.
