Studio for Electronic Music (WDR)
On 18 October 1951 a meeting was held at the then Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in connection with a tape-recorded late-night programme about electronic music broadcast on the evening of the same day.
Informed via a report on this meeting, the Intendant (General Manager) of the radio station, Hanns Hartmann, gave the green light for establishment of the studio.
In the 1920s he had published a book on the theory of atonal music, which had gotten him expelled from Franz Bölsche [de]'s composition class at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln.
Schütz has never considered himself to be a composer, and regards the attribution to him of this "piece", which "was produced with very primitive means, which is all that was available to us in those days", as "purely an accident".
In addition, the inputs and outputs of all sound sources, filters, and modulators converged here, in a cross-plug-in busbar panel, so that the connections of the individual devices with one another could easily be established and modified as needed.
Because right at the very beginning the Monochord and Melochord were not yet available—but tape recorders probably were—Robert Beyer and Herbert Eimert were restricted to sound materials that Meyer-Eppler had made in Bonn.
Although Beyer and Eimert could not really produce original music this way, they nevertheless gained substantial experience in dealing with the procedures developed by Meyer-Eppler.
As the studio finally took concrete form, Beyer and Eimert were able to create, both together and separately, some sound studies, following purely auditory criteria.
The first public demonstration of these pieces took place in a Neues Musikfest (New Music Festival) presentation on 26 May 1953 in the large broadcasting studio of the Cologne Radio Centre.
Eimert and Beyer produced Klangfiguren II here, and later Stockhausen realised both of his Elektronische Studien (1953–54) and Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) there.
[7][8] From this point onward Eimert actively followed the recommendation in the opening of the report by the Intendant mentioned above: "It would only be necessary to make these suitable facilities available to composers commissioned by the radio station."
The French composer Olivier Messiaen had the idea in the late 1940s of transferring the organisation of pitches onto durations, dynamics, and, conceptually, even timbres.
Soon after his arrival, Stockhausen came to regard the Monochord and Melochord (which had been purchased on the recommendation of Meyer-Eppler) as useless for the production of music that was to be organised in all its aspects, especially timbre.
He turned to Fritz Enkel, the head of the calibration and testing department, and asked for a sine-wave generator or a beat-frequency oscillator capable of producing sine waves, from which Stockhausen intended to build sound spectra.
[10] After composing two works entirely from sine tones—Studie I and Studie II, in 1953 and 1954, respectively—Stockhausen decided to use sound material that could not be created from the devices in the studio, namely speech and song.
It was from Meyer-Eppler that Stockhausen learned about aleatory and statistical processes, and became convinced that these were necessary to avoid the sterility toward which totally organised music tends to lead.
If simple sine-tone composition with indication of frequencies, durations, and sound levels could still relatively simply be represented graphically, this was no longer possible for the increasingly complex pieces from the mid-1950s.
Koenig wanted to create a music that was "really electronic", that is, imagined from the given technical resources of the studio, and no longer just disguised reminiscences of traditional instrumental performances.
In the process, however, it was clear to him theoretically in 1957—therefore at the time when, in the USA, Max Mathews was making the very first experiments with sound production by a computer—that the technical capabilities of the studio were very limited.
Nowadays, the term "sample" refers to what Koenig meant, namely the elongation (distance from the null axis) of a signal to some point in time.
Eimert was officially succeeded as director of the studio by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1963, and three years later, at the insistence of Karl O. Koch, head of the WDR Music Department, the directorship was split into two parts: artistic and administrative.
From the compact studio, established for ready usability by Fritz Enkel a decade earlier, came an assortment of individual devices which for the most part were not intended for use together with each other.
Younger composers such as Johannes Fritsch, David C. Johnson, and Mesías Maiguashca now developed the possibilities of electronic sound generation and transformation in more playful and unconventional ways.
Mauricio Kagel placed a particular emphasis in his work on complex circuiting of the equipment (including feedback of the outputs of devices into their own inputs) in order to cause the most unpredictable results possible.
[22] Other composers who used the Synthi 100 in the Cologne studio at this time included Rolf Gehlhaar in 1975, for his Fünf deutsche Tänze / Five German Dances,[23] John McGuire in 1978, for Pulse Music III,[24][25] and York Höller in 1979–80, for his Mythos for 13 instruments, percussion, and electronic sounds.
This prevented any new productions in the studio after York Höller's Schwarze Halbinseln (Black Peninsulas, for large orchestra with vocal and electronic sounds) in 1982.
For several years, the studio's engineering and technical personnel was hired out to external, co-produced projects, such as the 1984 Venice premiere of Luigi Nono's Prometeo, produced in cooperation with the Freiburg Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung.
[29] Even before the move, Stockhausen was able to produce the electronic music for the "Greeting" and "Farewell" of his opera Montag aus Licht, by temporarily making use of Production 2 in the Broadcasting Centre.
[16] In 2017, it was announced that an anonymous patron had purchased Burg Mödrath near Kerpen, the building in which Stockhausen had been born in 1928, and was opening it as an exhibition space for modern art, with the museum of the WDR Studio to be installed on the first floor.
[33][34] A CD, produced by Konrad Boehmer, offers a survey of 15 the earliest pieces from the 1950s (works by Eimert, Eimert/Beyer, Goeyvaerts, Gredinger, Koenig, Pousseur, Hambraeus, Evangelisti, Ligeti, Klebe, and Brün):
