Editing Karlheinz Stockhausen (section)

===Critical reception===
[[Robin Maconie]] finds that, "Compared to the work of his contemporaries, Stockhausen's music has a depth and rational integrity that is quite outstanding... His researches, initially guided by Meyer-Eppler, have a coherence unlike any other composer then or since".{{sfn|Maconie|1989|loc=177–178}} Maconie also compares Stockhausen to [[Ludwig van Beethoven|Beethoven]]: "If a genius is someone whose ideas survive all attempts at explanation, then by that definition Stockhausen is the nearest thing to Beethoven this century has produced. Reason? His music lasts",{{sfn|Maconie|1988}} and "As Stravinsky said, one never thinks of Beethoven as a superb orchestrator because the quality of invention transcends mere craftsmanship. It is the same with Stockhausen: the intensity of imagination gives rise to musical impressions of an elemental and seemingly unfathomable beauty, arising from necessity rather than conscious design".{{sfn|Maconie|1989|loc=178}}

Christopher Ballantine, comparing the categories of [[Experimental music|experimental]] and [[avant-garde music]], concludes that <blockquote>Perhaps more than any other contemporary composer, Stockhausen exists at the point where the dialectic between experimental and avant-garde music becomes manifest; it is in him, more obviously than anywhere else, that these diverse approaches converge. This alone would seem to suggest his remarkable significance.{{sfn|Ballantine|1977|loc=244}}</blockquote>

[[Igor Stravinsky]] expressed great, but not uncritical, enthusiasm for Stockhausen's music in the conversation books with [[Robert Craft]],<ref>E.g., {{harvnb|Craft and Stravinsky|1960|loc=118}}.</ref> and for years organised private listening sessions with friends in his home where he played tapes of Stockhausen's latest works.{{sfn|Stravinsky|1984|loc=356}}{{sfn|Craft|2002|loc=141}} In an interview published in March 1968, however, he says of an unidentified person, <blockquote>I have been listening all week to the piano music of a composer now greatly esteemed for his ability to stay an hour or so ahead of his time, but I find the alternation of note-clumps and silences of which it consists more monotonous than the foursquares of the dullest eighteenth-century music.{{sfn|[Craft]|1968|loc=4}}</blockquote> The following October, a report in ''Sovetskaia Muzyka''{{sfn|Anon.|1968}} translated this sentence (and a few others from the same article) into Russian, substituting for the conjunction "but" the phrase "Ia imeiu v vidu Karlkheintsa Shtokkhauzena" ("I am referring to Karlheinz Stockhausen"). When this translation was quoted in Druskin's Stravinsky biography, the field was widened to ''all'' of Stockhausen's compositions and Druskin adds for good measure, "indeed, works he calls unnecessary, useless and uninteresting", again quoting from the same ''Sovetskaia Muzyka'' article, even though it had made plain that the characterization was of American "university composers".{{sfn|Druskin|1974|loc=207}}