 In August 1951 , just after his first Darmstadt visit , Stockhausen began working with a form of athematic serial composition that rejected the twelve @-@ tone technique of Schoenberg ( Felder 1977 , 92 ) . He characterized many of these earliest compositions ( together with the music of other , like @-@ minded composers of the period ) as punktuelle ( " punctual " or " pointist " music , commonly mistranslated as " pointillist " ) Musik , though one critic concluded after analysing several of these early works that Stockhausen " never really composed punctually " ( Sabbe 1981 ) . Compositions from this phase include Kreuzspiel ( 1951 ) , the Klavierstücke I – IV ( 1952 — the fourth of this first set of four Klavierstücke , titled Klavierstück IV , is specifically cited by the composer as an example of " punctual music " ( Stockhausen Texte , 2 : 19 ) ) , and the first ( unpublished ) versions of Punkte and Kontra @-@ Punkte ( 1952 ) ( Stockhausen Texte , 2 : 20 ) . However , several works from these same years show Stockhausen formulating his " first really ground @-@ breaking contribution to the theory and , above all , practice of composition " , that of " group composition " , found in Stockhausen 's works as early as 1952 and continuing throughout his compositional career ( Toop 2005 , 3 ) . This principle was first publicly described by Stockhausen in a radio talk from December 1955 , titled " Gruppenkomposition : Klavierstück I " ( Stockhausen Texte , 1 : 63 – 74 ) . 
