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I recently learned that Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of my artistic idols, died on December 5 at age 79 – this is a terrible loss for the music world and the art community in general.

Stockhausen’s music found me as recently as 2003, when I took a class in contemporary electronic music as an eager music undergraduate. His Gesang der Jünglinge will remain one of the most simultaneously disturbing and uplifting works of all time and one of my personal favorites. Stockhausen was a pioneer in his use of sound and experimentation with the limits of musicality.

The following is his obituary from Pitchfork:

A man content to exist outside the classical establishment, Stockhausen saw his influence extend beyond it as well. Among his advocates were the Beatles, who included the composer on the collage cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The 362 works Stockhausen composed include the world’s longest opera cycle (Licht, completed in 2003), the first annotated and published piece of electronic music (1954’s Electronic Study II), and a piece for string quartet that also called for four helicopters (1993’s Helicopter String Quartet). Like John Cage, he demonstrated a fascination with aleatory composition, that which accounts for an element of chance. Early in his career he was also a proponent of serialism, composition based on mathematical formulas.

Stockhausen studied under Olivier Messiaen and Les Six member Darius Milhaud, among others. He was a highly respected teacher as well, whose students included several of krautrock’s prominent figures, including Can’s Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt.

“In friendship and gratitude for everything that he has given to us personally and to humanity through his love and his music,” wrote longtime collaborators Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer in the Stockhausen-Verlag statement, “we bid farewell to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who lived to bring celestial music to humans, and human music to the celestial beings, so that Man may listen to God and God may hear His children.”