Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it.

He was educated at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the University of Cologne and later studied with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. In addition to electronic music—both with and without live performers—they range from miniatures for musical boxes through works for solo instruments songs chamber music choral and orchestral music to a cycle of seven full-length operas. One of the leading figures of the Darmstadt School his compositions and theories were and remain widely influential not only on composers of art music but also on jazz and popular music.