The early history of electronic music in the Cologne WDR Studio - 4/4.

26 September 2025. 4:00 pm
Budapest Music Center - Library
1093 Budapest, Mátyás utca 8.

It would take someone who could dominate the system of sounds, someone who would be genius enough to combine the reconstructive, even the archaic, with the revolutionary.
Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus

To what extent did Herbert Eimert, the first composer-founder of the WDR Studio in Cologne, feel constrained by the fact that initially it was only possible to create new works by montage, rhythmisation and transposition of Meyer-Eppler's Sound Catalogue and Heinz Schütz's improvised sounds? What prospects could his imagination as a composer have had with this highly limited toolbox, in which he could not even apply the principles of dodecaphony?

The change came about when, in 1953, at Eimert's instigation, the WDR hired the young Karlheinz Stockhausen as an artistic collaborator, who attended Messiaen's classes in Paris and also mastered the technique of musique concrète. Under the influence of Karel Goeyvaerts, Stockhausen had already become acquainted with the principles of serialism in 1951 and in 1952, also through a friend, he discovered the sine wave generator. The Messiaenian impulse, combined with this cumbersome instrument of radio engineering and Stockhausen's creativity and dogged persistence, bore fruit. The next great era of the Studio begins with radically new compositional and aesthetic principles. And so we arrive from Stockhausen's Die Konkrete Etüde ⅕ to his electronic compositions Studie I and Studie II.

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