Karlheinz Stockhausen, a controversial German composer, has died at the age of 79 in Kuerten in western Germany, the Stockhausen Foundation announced this evening.

He died at his home on Wednesday and will be buried in a cemetery in the forest outside his home town.

The eccentric composer was best known for his ground-breaking work in electronic music and experimentation with unusual sounds.

His renegade approach to music made him popular with fellow musicians from across the genre. Miles Davis, Brian Eno and Bjork were among the artists to cite him as an influence.

His foundation said Stockhausen composed a total of 362 individually performable works.

He was a member of the serialist school at the start of his career but, from the mid-1950s, he became known for his experiments with aleatoric technique, which leaves key elements during a musical performance to chance.

He often departed radically from musical tradition and liked to play with extremes of sound. He would try to create what he termed a “language” with clicks, microtonal shifts and rushing noises by finding new ways to play traditional instruments.

Stockhausen's most famous work, Stimmung (1968) is among his most apparently simple. It was based on a single chord using different pitches and tone over 70 minutes.

He was one of the few major twentieth-century composers to write a large amount of music for the trumpet, inspired by his son's love of the instrument.

Stockhausen was born in 1928 in Modrath, a village in the Cologne area of Germany, both his parents were killed during the war.

He had six children during two marriages, he married Doris Andreae in 1951 and then Mary Bauermeister 16 years later.

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