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The first performance of Stockhausen鈥檚 Gruppen took place on 24 March 1958 in a big, flat-floored exhibition hall in Cologne.

Gruppen, in German, means "groups". The photograph on the front of the score shows orchestras arranged around the hall on three sides of a big square with the audience in the middle. In total, there were 109 musicians including twelve percussionists, two saxophonists and an electric guitarist. And not one, but three conductors: the 30-year-old Stockhausen himself, with his friends and fellow leaders of the post-war avant-garde, Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna.

Stockhausen, who was of a religious bent, would undoubtedly have had the choirs from St Mark鈥檚 in Venice more than three centuries before in mind. But there was another impetus for splitting up the orchestra into three and making the music spin around the performance space.

Stockhausen was one of the pioneers of electronic music. Right there in his home city of Cologne, just two years before, he had produced what some describe as the first masterpiece of electronic music: his Gesang der Junglinge ("Song of Youths"), a work for tape on an Old Testament theme in which ecstatic songs of praise were transformed and flown around the performing space on electronic speakers. Stockhausen wanted the same "flying music" effect in his piece for three orchestras.

The effect must have been thrilling. The music itself was organised according to the total serial method (very de rigeur, for the time), so the notes Stockhausen used, the rhythms, the constantly varying tempi of the music and even the density of the sounds all corresponded to a twelve-tone series. Stockhausen wanted to create a new kind of music, free from the centuries of tradition that he believed had been tainted by the war in which his own family had been destroyed.

But in addition to these numbers and charts and series, there was another inspiration. While composing Gruppen, Stockhausen spent three months working in a little room in the Swiss Alps, looking out of the window into a great valley. The specific shapes, as well as the monumental theatre of the mountains, found their way into Gruppen. Stockhausen was the great moderniser - but he was a German Romantic as well.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by 麻豆社 Radio 3鈥檚 Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a 麻豆社 season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This is an excerpt from a recording by the 麻豆社 Symphony Orchestra with conductor Martyn Brabbins.

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