The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has died, aged 79. There is a good survey of his career here in the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph’s obituary here, while Tyler Cowen weighs in here with interesting comments on the work (how many other academic economists could write sensibly about contemporary music?). He singles out Mantra for two pianos and electronics, Stimmung (there’s a terrific new recording by Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices) and Gesang der Jünglinge, to which I would add the choral Invisible Choirs, the orchestral pieces Gruppen and Inori, the early chamber works Kreuzspiel, Zeitmasse and Kontra-punkte and the purely electronic Oktophonie from 1991, which depicts an inter-galactic aerial battle and, played suitably loud, is utterly terrifying.

I don’t agree with Cowen’s dismissal of Tierkreis for music boxes, which is the one Stockhausen CD that doesn’t make my wife flee from the room; and he is a bit harsh on the operas too. Yes, Stockhausen was, like his teacher Olivier Messiaen, never afraid of boring his listeners, but there are wonderful instrumental passages among the longueurs, two of which are collected in different arrangements on a marvellous CD by his trumpeter son Markus, and the electronic music can be ravishing, as in the opening water music of Montag.

But there’s no argument that the Helikopter Quartet of 1996 must be the most barking mad music ever recorded. This takes a perfectly harmless string quartet, the Arditti, puts each player into a separate chopper, and then they fly for half an hour scraping away at some pretty thin music listening to each other through headphones. We hear them over the thud-thud-thud of the rotors. And the helicopters are the best bit.

None of this music, needless to say, is on iTunes (apart from the Markus Stockhausen album, and also his Michaels Reise, a sort of trumpet concerto spinoff from the opera Donnerstag), but it’s all available by mail order here. The CDs aren't cheap but the packaging is lavish. You can steal chunks of them via BitTorrent or similar, obviously, but apart from the morality of it Stockhausen was fanatical about sound quality - and all the CDs are sonically spectacular.