Renowned German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen passed away Wednesday at his home in Cologne, Germany, after a brief illness. With his death, the world has lost one of its most illustrious composers in recent times, one of the first to use electronic music and probably among the most influential 20th century music composers.

Stockhausen has had a prolific career as a music composer. He has to his credit more than 300 individual musical compositions, and is better known for his experimental forays with electronic music in the 60s and 70s of the previous century. With his musical style, he also managed to make a definite impact on both avant garde as well as classical western music.

The impact of his musical genius can be gauged by the fact that Beatles put him on the cover of their landmark album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, along with the images of other musical masters from that time. Other musicians who have acknowledged being influenced by Stockhausen’s music include the legendary Miles Davis and also Bjork.

Stockhausen has also come up with a range of sound bites, some awe-inspiring, some highly controversial. He once said in an interview that he loved silence, and that sound can become music if one could relate it to other sounds. To quote him, “Any sound can become music if it is related to other sounds ... every sound is precious and can become beautiful if I put it at the right place, at the right moment.”

He also courted controversy when he called the 9/11 attacks by the Al-Qaeda the ‘greatest work of art imaginable.’ Talking about the 9/11 attacks, he said, “Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert and then dying, just imagine what happened there.”

His 9/11 comments drew heavy criticism, and he later tried to control the damage by saying all he meant was the only person who could have orchestrated the attacks so well was the devil.

More than his sound bites, however, it is his work that drew people to him. Even when his career as a composer was in its nascent stages, he experimented with what he called ‘musique concrete’. He recorded sounds from everyday life, distorted them electronically, and then pieced them together to form unique compositions.

Stockhausen’s work has scaled the entire spectrum, from composing pieces with solo instruments to events of enormous magnitude, where he mixed different musical elements like opera, dance, and even mime. One of his key works is Licht.

In Licht, he mixed solo and ensemble music and also electronic and concrete music with mime. It premiered at the La Scala opera house in Milan in 1981, and gained him acclaim among conventional classical music composers.

However, not everyone was ready to chance their arm on this new musical style, and it was at the West German Radio (WDR) Studio for New Music in Cologne that he was able to pursue his musical experiments.

His association with WDR started then, and continued till the end. He worked there from 1953, and later also became the artistic director for WDR. It was, in fact, WDR who first broke news of Stockhausen’s death in a brief statement.

Stockhausen had been closely associated with WDR for a long period of time, over 20 years. In a statement, current WDR artistic director Monika Piel said with the death of Stockhausen, the studio had lost a great artist and an internationally acclaimed avant garde musician.

Stockhausen was born on August 22, 1928, in a small village near Cologne called Burg Modrath. He had six children from two marriages. He was 79 at the time of his death. His burial will take place in a forest cemetery in Kuerten, a town near Cologne.