Perhaps the most (in)famous – together with Pierre Boulez – of the European avant-garde composers to have emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, Karlheinz Stockhausen created an output that explores almost every facet of compositional innovation.  His music is renowned for pushing performers and audiences beyond their pre-conceived limits, but arguably the greatest of his boundary-defying ideas challenged himself as much as any third party.  Licht (‘Light’), a cycle of seven ‘operas’ based on the seven days of the week, occupied much of his life between 1977 and its completion in 2003: a similarly ambitious project begun soon thereafter and entitled Klang (‘Sound’) remained incomplete at his death.  If completed, it would have comprised twenty-four pieces for considerably smaller-scale instrumental forces – one for each hour of the day.

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