Stockhausen: Meeting the guru of modern music Pierre-Laurent Aimard: Pianist, artistic director of Aldeburgh Festival I first saw Stockhausen in 1968, when he came to Lyon to lead a performance of his Hymnen. He was 40, I was eleven, and I was so impressed with this tall long-haired man, so sure of himself, with such a presence. Later when I was in my twenties, he came to Paris to direct the Ensemble Intercontemporain, where I was resident pianist. What struck me was the concentrated intensity he gave to every note, its colour, its weight, how it functioned in the whole architecture of the piece. Really, to be with him was an education in listening. He was demanding, yes, but he gave more than he took, he was so warm-hearted. There was a kind of naivety about him, which was very charming. I remember at the end of a very intense day of rehearsing, we all went to a restaurant. Karlheinz looked at me and said, "Pierre-Laurent, you look so pale and tired. You must go to Africa and be with the lions in the sun! He really wanted me to go to Africa there and then. That was typical of him. Greg Rose: Composer, conductor, and founder of the choir Singcircle, which performed and recorded Stockhausen's Stimmung When I was 15 I heard Stockhausen's electronic piece Gesang der Jünglinge ('Song of the young boys') and it changed my life. I thought, that's the kind of music I want make. In late 1978 I went with a colleague to see Stockhausen in Kurten to get his advice about performing his choral piece Stimmung. "I can give you half-an-hour," he said in a fax, but in fact he gave us two days. He lived in this extraordinary house he'd designed himself, where every room was on a slightly different level, and each one faced onto a specific plant in the garden. Stockhausen was very surprised when I told him I'd prepared his piece from the score. "What, you haven't listened to my recording?" he said. He just couldn't believe that anyone could ignore his own recording. I interpreted his score in ways he didn't approve, and at one point he flared up and said "You hate my music." He was such a strong personality it was easy to go from being "in" to being "out." But we made it up in the end. Helmut Lachenmann: German modernist composer, with a political edge very unlike Stockhausen. Stockhausen absolutely changed my life as a composer. When I met him at the Darmstadt Summer School for new music in 1956, I was 22, and my horizons stopped at Bartok and Stravinsky. He was only 28, and yet he knew about Webern and Messiaen. He seemed to be totally sure of himself, obsessed by his own ideas of creating a totally new world of sounds. No-one else mattered to him. In spite of his juvenile arrogance and aggressiveness, I liked him. Once when I went up to him just to say thank you for what he had given to me he became so warm and almost tearful. Stockhausen belonged to a generation which could not tolerate old symphonic ways of thinking, which had been abused in the Nazi time just for ideological propaganda. Having discovered the magic fascination of his own musical world, he became a sort of guru, refusing to watch television or to read newspapers. In his later years he felt betrayed because he felt his music was neglected. He was like a child in many ways. But his music shall remain, radical and beautiful. I hated him and I loved him. Gillian Moore: Head of Classical Music, Southbank Centre My first sight of Stockhausen was late one moonlit night, outside his house in the village of Kürten. I'd flown to Cologne with a colleague to see him sometime in the mid-Nineties, and we had to take a taxi to this very modern house, in the middle of the forest perched on a hill. There'd been a snowstorm, and the moon was out, and through the glittery light this tall very imposing long-haired figure in a cape emerged, walking down from the house to the gate to meet us. He looked like some romantic hero in a Caspar David Friedrich painting. He led us inside and served some very good German wine in those tall green-stemmed German glasses, but only drank a millimetre himself. We were there to talk about a festival of his music at the Southbank, and what struck me was his total control of everything; the conversation, the meal, and the subject-matter. No detail escaped him. People say he became a bit hippy-dippy in later years, but I think that incredible mental focus never left him. Rohl Gehlhaar: Electronic composer, member of Stockhausen's performing ensemble in the late Sixties I met Stockhausen in 1966 at the Davis Campus of the University of California, where I was a student. He was tall and amazingly charismatic, with a kind of sparkling, shining quality. He had this charming way of opening his eyes very wide when he was surprised, which seemed to be quite often. His stamina was inexhaustible. I remember one composition seminar which went on for three hours, which only ended when he said, "You all look exhausted, I'd better stop now." We all tended to imitate his ideas in our own pieces, which he didn't like. "Show me something that will surprise me," he used to say. He invited me to join him in Germany as his personal assistant, and I later became a member of the touring ensemble that played his partly improvised, so-called "intuitive" pieces. I remember on one occasion I was playing a huge tam-tam, and I had an idea for a certain sound in the middle of the performance. I looked up and there he was at the mixing desk, smiling and nodding vigorously as if to say, "Yes, go on!" He was very open to other people's ideas in those days.. Nuria Schoenberg-Nono: Daughter of Arnold Schoenberg and widow of Luigi Nono, a one-time modernist ally of Stockhausen and later an adversary Copy to come Stockhausen's 'Gruppen' and other works are performed at the Southbank Centre, London SE1, as part of 'The Rest is Noise' on Oct 5 & 6.