The musical legacy of Karlheinz Stockhausen: Looking back and forward

International research workshop during the Stockhausen Concerts and Courses Kürten, 10-11 August 2011

Organised by the Stockhausen Foundation for Music in cooperation with the Department of Musicology of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

On 10th and 11th August 2011 the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, in cooperation with the Department of Musicology of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and in the context of the annual Stockhausen Concerts and Courses Kürten, will hold an international workshop on the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Around four years after Stockhausen's death, the workshop will bring world experts on Stockhausen's music together with younger researchers to consider the totality of the composer's work. Lectures and discussions will aim to provide new impulses for understanding Stockhausen's complete oeuvre retrospectively, and will also highlight approaches and perspectives for future research.
The workshop will focus not only on Stockhausen's compositions as musical legacy, but will also look at issues of historical context, reception and criticism, and the longer term impact of Stock­hausen's work. A further area for reflection is impulses and influences on and through the work of Stockhausen, especially with regard to the contemporary arts in general and compositional practice spe­cifically. In addition, the workshop will ask what perspectives for the future are offered by Stockhausen's music, and what influence his music could have on the further development of composition in the 21st century.
The two-day event will take place in Kürten during the annual Stockhausen Concerts and Courses Kürten, which will take place from 6-14 August 2011. The courses, which were initiated by Stockhausen himself and will be held in 2011 for the 14th time, were set up to give younger performers, sound technicians, researchers and interested listeners the chance to learn more about Stockhausen's music, its performance practice and its musical and aesthetic context, directly from leading musicians and musicologists including many who worked with Stockhausen himself for many years.