Paul Morley on music: Stockhausen

There is a budget-price edition of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra, for two pianos, percussion – sometimes crotales, which are essentially antique cymbals – and electronics, 40 years old this autumn, released by Naxos next month. I am going to recommend it, even use the words "astonishing" and "masterpiece" and mean them in a Bach sort of way rather than, say, a Paulo Nutini way, because for less than £5 you will be able to get hold of such mystical and yet playful thinking about melody, space and musical motion.

Even though your first thought may be that it is simply Stockhausen-y fancy weirdness, a mad rush of jagged notes, eccentric rhythms, clownish singing and fractured nonsense, it's actually very beautiful, formally composed from beginning to end, and a return for Stockhausen to notated music after a late-60s detour into non-notation, where, keeping an ear on John Cage, he handed large amounts of authorship to the performer. Mantra shows Stockhausen beginning to move away from electronics, randomness and pure sound towards an extravagant, exotic use of more traditional instruments.

I can recommend some other music featuring the crotale – such as Debussy's Prelude a l'après-midi d'un faune and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which, as Leonard Bernstein knew, is all about sex, causing Stravinsky simply to say "wow!" when he heard his 1958 recording – and note its use on music by Björk, Wilco, Rush and Yes. It also featured on the Grateful Dead's Anthem of the Sun, their second album and first real experimental record, live drug jams fused with interminable studio research, uncovering the essence of west-coast psychedelia.

Musique concrète carves up bluegrass, quasi-serialism darkens the blues, and in the writing of this little notice, I have found out how well it follows, or precedes, Mantra. (I then played Phonophani's new album on the Rune Grammofon label before John Mellencamp's No Better Than This on Rounder.) Then you can get to the Dead's American Beauty, folkier, dreamier, more country than Cage, more Band rustic soul than Stockhausen, 40 years old this November, with five stars written all over it (that's Stanley Kubrick five stars – not Christopher Nolan five stars).

Meanwhile, of course, in the dissolving present, there is Dannii Minogue on ITV2 with Style Queen, involving her life, loves, baby and businesses and the journey from definitive 90s has-been to resplendent, immune new fame. I suppose I must mention her so that there is some sort of photograph that goes with this column that draws you in, as no doubt a shot of a pondering Stockhausen might cause concern, because Stockhausen's crotales are not necessarily as contemporary as Dannii's new perfume. Personally, I find something Stockhausen said about Mantra – "Naturally, the unified construction of Mantra is a musical miniature of the unified macro-structure of the cosmos, just as it is a magnification into the acoustic time-field of the unified micro-structure of the harmonic vibrations in notes themselves" – much sexier than Dannii, but then Oval's new LP, Oh, Markuss Popp's first for nearly a decade, making a Stockhausen move from pure electronics to the treatment of "real" instruments, is my kind of a comeback.

Dannii and plastic Jedward and the Saturdays, loving themselves to death on ITV2, represent the hysterical end of a pop story that began with "wonderful" Radio 1, Mickie Most and Pan's People. Mantra is part of a story, still evolving, making more sense as the 21st century becomes itself, that explores the extreme boundaries of music, of what music can be. It's not as such fun, but it's pretty fantastic.