page_title: Karlheinz Stockhausen
section_title: Space music and Expo '70
hierarchical_section_title: Karlheinz Stockhausen / Compositions / Space music and Expo '70
caption_attribution_description: Korean Pavilion. April 1970, Osaka Expo'70.
context_page_description: Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. A critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music". He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.
  He was educated at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the University of Cologne, later studying with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. One of the leading figures of the Darmstadt School, his compositions and theories were and remain widely influential, not only on composers of art music, but also on jazz and popular music. His works, composed over a period of nearly sixty years, eschew traditional forms. In addition to electronic music—both with and without live performers—they range from miniatures for musical boxes through works for solo instruments, songs, chamber music, choral and orchestral music, to a cycle of seven full-length operas. His theoretical and other writings comprise ten large volumes.
context_section_description: Since the mid-1950s, Stockhausen had been developing concepts of spatialization in his works, not only in electronic music, such as the 5-channel Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) and Telemusik (1966), and 4-channel Kontakte (1958–60) and Hymnen (1966–67). Instrumental/vocal works like Gruppen for three orchestras (1955–57) and Carré for four orchestras and four choirs (1959–60) also exhibit this trait (Stockhausen Texte, 2:71–72, 49–50, 102–103; Stockhausen 1989a, 105–108; Cott 1973, 200–201). In lectures such as "Music in Space" from 1958 (Stockhausen Texte, 1:152–75), he called for new kinds of concert halls to be built, "suited to the requirements of spatial music". His idea was 
  a spherical space which is fitted all around with loudspeakers. In the middle of this spherical space a sound-permeable, transparent platform would be suspended for the listeners. They could hear music composed for such standardized spaces coming from above, from below and from all points of the compass. (Stockhausen Texte, 1:153)
   In 1968, the West German government invited Stockhausen to collaborate on the German Pavilion at the 1970 World Fair in Osaka and to create a joint multimedia project for it with artist Otto Piene. Other collaborators on the project included the pavilion's architect, Fritz Bornemann, Fritz Winckel, director of the Electronic Music Studio at the Technical University of Berlin, and engineer Max Mengeringhausen. The pavilion theme was "gardens of music", in keeping with which Bornemann intended "planting" the exhibition halls beneath a broad lawn, with a connected auditorium "sprouting" above ground. Initially, Bornemann conceived this auditorium in the form of an amphitheatre, with a central orchestra podium and surrounding audience space. In the summer of 1968, Stockhausen met with Bornemann and persuaded him to change this conception to a spherical space with the audience in the centre, surrounded by loudspeaker groups in seven rings at different "latitudes" around the interior walls of the sphere (Kurtz 1992, 166; Föllmer 1996).
  Although Stockhausen and Piene's planned multimedia project, titled Hinab-Hinauf, was developed in detail (Stockhausen Texte, 3:155–74), the World Fair committee rejected their concept as too extravagant and instead asked Stockhausen to present daily five-hour programs of his music (Kurtz 1992, 178). Stockhausen's works were performed for 5½ hours every day over a period of 183 days to a total audience of about a million listeners (Wörner 1973, 256). According to Stockhausen's biographer, Michael Kurtz, "Many visitors felt the spherical auditorium to be an oasis of calm amidst the general hubbub, and after a while it became one of the main attractions of Expo 1970" (Kurtz 1992, 179).
caption: The German Pavilion at Expo '70 (the spherical auditorium is out of view to the right)
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