Deeply shocked by the German composer’s death on Wednesday, I think there’s no need to revisit the extraordinary career of one of the most important personality of the music scene after World War II. To learn more about him, please go to www.stockhausen.org

Closely related to radio first studios at the beginning of the Fifties and to an emblematic figure of the electronic music Pierre Schaeffer, this music is too often forgotten as a major influence in the history of the music by introducing electronics into the contemporary classical music.

This is a dangerous topic. I don’t intend to discus generaly about musical training and teaching but I’ll focus on the particular case of contemporary music, because it takes less place in the education than it deserves, when it’s not completely “forgotten”.

The spectral music is a movement which was born at the beginning of the 1970′s with the research of Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail. It is an aesthetic school from which, following work of their elders, several composers of the next intermediate generation draw their inspiration: Philippe Hurel, Philippe Leroux, Marc-Andre Dalbavie, Jean-Luc Herve, Thierry Went, Fabien Lévy or Thierry Blondeau in France; Kaija Saariaho or Magnus Lindberg in Finland; George Benjamin or Julian Anderson in the United Kingdom, to quote only some of them.

Lutoslawski, Xenakis, Britten, Carter, Penderecki, Kurtág, Lindberg, Dutilleux, Ligeti, Murail, don’t all these names say anything to you? You surely don’t listen to music known as “contemporary”. “Contemporary” even if it’s quite obvious that any music was one day contemporary.