From 1931 to 1937, he studied musicology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with Friedrich Blume, Curt Sachs, Arnold Schering, Georg Schünemann and Erich Schumann.
After obtaining his doctorate in 1937, he was offered a post as an assistant at the State Institute for Music Research.
Then he left the German Democratic Republic and was professor at the Free University of Berlin until 1961.
From September 1955 to May 1956, he was a visiting professor at Stanford University as part of the Fulbright Program.
For this purpose, he developed a set of tables in his habilitation thesis, in which all musical instruments were to be sorted according to a constant sequence of questions.