Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has ha an enormous influence on contemporary music. Personally, he’s enigmatic: “This 77-year-old musical pioneer has claimed that he comes not from Burg Mödrath, near Cologne (listed as his birthplace on his biography), but rather from a planet orbiting the star Sirius, and that he was put on earth to give voice to a cosmic music that will change the world. He is, to put it mildly, a one-off.”