IN FRIENDSHIP and gratitude for everything that he has given to us personally and to humanity through his love and his music, we bid FAREWELL to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who lived to bring celestial music to humans, and human music to the celestial beings, so that Man may listen to GOD and GOD may hear His children.

On December 5th he ascended with JOY through HEAVEN'S DOOR, in order to continue to compose in PARADISE with COSMIC PULSES in eternal HARMONY, as he had always hoped to do: You, who summon me to Heaven, Eva, Mikael and Maria, let me eternally compose music for Heaven's Father-Mother, GOD creator of Cosmic Music.

May Saint Michael, together with Heaven's musicians in ANGEL PROCESSIONS and INVISIBLE CHOIRS welcome him with a fitting musical GREETING.

On behalf on him and following his example, we will endeavor to continue to protect the music.

"Those who are familiar with Pierre Boulez's earlier "Complete Webern" on Sony will notice that his new Deutsche Grammophon edition contains six discs to Sony's three. That's because Sony only included works for which Webern assigned opus numbers, plus the composer's Schubert and Bach arrangements. DG fleshes out the picture with all of Webern's posthumously published music, mostly dating from his apprentice years. Virtually all of these recordings already have been available. Discs one through three are given over to orchestral, choral, and chamber works with Boulez leading the Berlin Philharmonic, BBC Singers, and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. Soprano Christiane Oelze's survey of Webern's lieder with voice and piano occupies disc four, with the addition of three unreleased songs set to poems by Ferdinand Avenarius. On disc five, the Emerson Quartet plays all the string trio and quartet works. The final disc brings together the cello and piano music, the four pieces Op. 7 for violin and piano, and the piano works. Gianluca Cascioli's traversals of both 1906 movements for piano were previously released, while Krystian Zimerman recorded two tiny pieces and the Op. 27 Piano Variations especially for this collection.
We first encounter Webern writing music in a style that resembles Brahms with a little Grieg mixed in for good measure. Soon his harmonic palette blossoms with chromatic complexity and takes a refined turn during studies with Arnold Schoenberg. Finally, Webern's singular voice emerges by way of pocket pieces whose ascetic contours sport asymmetrical rhythms, canonic lines that leapfrog from instrument to instrument, and rigorously organized pitches. There's no filler, no fat, and every note counts.
Sometimes it's hard to grasp such fleeting, fragile, and texturally exposed music in a single hearing. When I hear a Webern work in concert, for instance, it's usually over before it begins. Imagine passing a Joan Miró painting while riding a bicycle and you'll understand what I mean. You need to find quiet listening space and know that you can play a movement or even a whole piece more than once."

"The dialogue between rule and imagination, basic to Boulez's thinking, found a new model some ten years later in ...explosante-fixe..., which was published as a composition kit, proposing performance by instruments moving through a cycle of six 'Transitoires' (numbered II to VII) to arrive at an 'Originel', all notated in sketch form. The 'Transitoires' here are derivatives; the 'Originel' presents the elemental material, focused on the note E flat (in German 'Es', and so the initial of Stravinsky, to whose memory the piece was inscribed). That note was the hub of concentric ripples: first the 'Originel', expanding the note to a melodic formula; then the 'Transitoires', making a set of variations on the formula; and finally the complete work, which would be a grand elaboration of the given components.
During the early seventies Boulez took this project along divergent paths: towards fixity in Rituel for orchestra, towards flexibility in a sequence of essays for instruments and electronics under the title ...explosante-fixe.... Some of those essays bore permanent fruit: out of a flute part came Mémoriale for flute and octet (1985) and out of a violin part the solo Anthèmes (1991). But the central enterprise waited until 1991-3, when the composer produced the present version for facilities at IRCAM: a solo flute and two accompanying flutes, all subject to computer transformation, and an unmodulated chamber orchestra similar to the one he had used in Répons against six electronic percussion soloists."

"Critical of other developments in contemporary music at the time, dominated by the serialists ('Darmstadt school') such as Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and KarlheinzStockhausen, Xenakis followed his own path, aided by his background in mathematics, engineering and design, and by his interest in complex sonic phenomena (rainstorms, street demonstrations, etc.). He incorporated probability theory into his compositional approach, as a means of generating and controlling large-scale events composed of massive numbers of individual elements. He also adopted the sonic entity (texture) as the primary material for the construction of musical form (rather than themes, or pitch structures)."