STOCKHAUSEN, Karlheinz

Stockhausen is at once the most successful and thus powerful of contemporary composers and, not surprisingly, the most problematic. His success is easy to measure—decades of support from the strongest European music publisher and the strongest German record label, not to mention the incomparably high-minded German radio stations. He has received commissions from orchestras and opera houses all over the world; he has been a visiting professor in America and, as Nicolas Slonimsky put...