gedanken über wdr studio für elektronische musik: the humans in the machines

“Preiset den Herrn.” Praise the Lord. Such is the invocation that begins Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), the most famous work to emerge from the Köln Studio for Electronic Music. The ethereal voice of boy soprano Josef Protschka, ramified into an angelic choir, calls out to listeners. It is amplified, refracted, reverberated, and tossed through an imaginary cathedral. Playful mantras contrast with metallic smears and low-frequency rumbles. Listeners are plunged, tumbling and spinning, into a spectacular sound world. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s early masterpiece of analog electronic music remains fascinating. It was an auspicious beginning to a career that only gained in fame and notoriety. Stockhausen’s influence over the Köln studio, where he was officially the leader from 1963–89, is undeniable. But there’s far more to the studio than Stockhausen’s dominance.

The Köln electronic studio – just a few modest rooms in the WDR Funkhaus – was a bustling Cold War center of exchange. This was one way that West Germany rebuilt its destroyed self, turning its technologies into peacetime innovations. Post-war culture was funded via radio stations, which maintained choirs, orchestras, and chamber ensembles, in addition to broadcasting news, radio plays, and music. Early studio leaders like Herbert Eimert understood that, to make a world-renowned laboratory, creative infusions must come from everywhere. He funded short-term fellowships, welcoming guest composers like the Hungarian György Ligeti (1923–2006), who escaped to the West on foot, under the cover of night, as the Soviet Socialist regime violently put down the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

György Ligeti

Ligeti’s “Artikulation“ (1958) gives a sense of what the studio group was thinking about. Small, short sounds – bloops, blurps, shizzles, and pings – alternate with longer mechanical sounds reminiscent of ringing bells and whooshing waves. Ligeti recorded the studio’s generators making their characteristic sounds. He chopped these up into small pieces of magnetic tape, sorting them into shoe boxes based on their sound qualities. Then, he reached into the boxes, drawing out fragments to paste together at random, gluing together the longer utterances of the piece. Why was he picking recorded sounds out of a shoebox? Why use a chance-based process, instead of an intentional one?

Ligeti was playing out his interest in information theory and the structure of speech. The group’s mentor was studio founder Werner Meyer-Eppler, a reformed Nazi who repurposed his knowledge of communication technology in service of electronic music. In seminars at the University of Bonn, Meyer-Eppler taught the studio composers to analyze speech as composed from smaller elements. They heard sine tones like vowels and noises like consonants. In the WDR’s “emergency” studio – located below ground for broadcasting in case of nuclear bombing – the composers gathered to read Finnegan’s Wake. They compared the sounds of Joyce’s linguistic muddle against their own melting pot. To complete the picture, add in their study of Dadaist poetry and the chance experiments of John Cage. Ligeti musicalized these ideas, filtering science, literature, and linguistics into his electronic music.

Mauricio Kagel 

In a similar situation was Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008), an Argentine-born Ashkenazy Jew whose leftist parents had settled in Buenos Aires after fleeing Soviet Russia in the 1920s. Kagel was involved in the Argentine avant-garde, but in 1957 emigrated to the larger hub of Köln, where he made his career. Kagel’s “Trancisión II“ (1958) for piano, percussion, and tape showcases the next stage of electronic music. It undermines the strict attitudes that had shaped the first years of the Köln studio. Listen with me: a pianist and a percussionist – playing their instruments inside, outside, and in every possible way – are much more audible than any electronic sounds. Where is the “tape music” in this? The tapes, in fact, contain pre-recorded piano and percussion rather than electronic sounds. During the performance, a third performer “plays” the tapes by freely mixing in a recording of the current performance as well as the pre-recorded tapes. The piece “remembers” itself – layers of present, recent past, and long past – as echoes and snatches of previous music haunt the players. It is an early example of “live electronics.” This one of the primary ways that performers reasserted themselves in electronic music, humanizing the cold, fixed media.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann

The re-embrace of the human may have peaked with Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s (1918–1970) “Requiem“ (1969). The enormous spectacle involved over 300 players in total – two speaking voices, a soprano and a baritone, three choirs, a jazz quintet, an organ, orchestra, and a tape made in the WDR studio. Zimmermann, a Köln-based composer, quoted texts by authors like Ezra Pound, Albert Camus, Pope John XXIII, Joseph Goebbels, and Mao Zedong, weaving them into a massive collage. The piece drew from oratorio, cantata, radio play, documentary narration, and spoken word poetry, leavened with instrumental and electronic sounds. It was a tour de force, a piece of totalizing expressive power. It provoked a wide spectrum of varied reactions, from shock, to awe, to disgust. Zimmermann’s overarching question, from the Austrian poet Konrad Bayer – “worauf hoffen? / es gibt nichts was zu erreichen wäre, außer dem tod.” [What can we hope for? / There is nothing that awaits us except death] – was, in its own way, prescient. Zimmermann’s struggle with mental illness ended in death by suicide in 1970. The Requiem mediates his personal pain, transposing it into the piece’s existential struggle. This is a humanist effort to reconcile competing voices and heal from catastrophe.

Stockhausen initiated a series of changes in the 1970s to modernize the studio, while he also stepped back. He took a position as professor at the Musikhochschule in 1971, which required his contract to change to “künstlerischer Berater” [artistic consultant]. Wolfgang Becker-Carsten took over organizational duties as “Redakteur für neue Musik” im WDR, commissioning a wider range of composers than before. Volker Müller, a skilled technician, began working closely with visiting composers in the studio. He would serve as its main technician from 1970 until the studio’s close in 2001. In his retirement, Müller cared for the machines that we now hope will be reanimated.

A small spark of the digital age burned in the EMS Synthi 100, which arrived in 1974. Though it was an analog synth – doubling many of the sine-tone and noise generators already familiar in the studio – it had an important new feature: digital memory. Boasting an on-board sequencer, the Synthi 100 stored samples and released them on command. Now, instead of the manual labor of recording, splicing, and pasting, composers and technicians finally had an automated process.

Rolf Gehlhaar

Rolf Gehlhaar’s (1943–2019) “Fünf deutsche Tänze“ (1975) demonstrates. In Nr. 4 linked below, a distant bagpipe-like melody flits through the alto register; a bass drone intensifies; synthesized layers multiply, repeating and tangling with one another. The drone-bed is like a foundation, providing ground to stand upon whilst the listener surveys the landscape of ruins and fragments. Gehlhaar’s technical interest was in spatialization; he used the Synthi’s sequencer to create voltage-controlled vectors, which gave the impression of sounds moving in space. This is particularly audible in Nr. 3 (all stream on YouTube). But if you forget the electronics for a minute and search up “five German dances” or “fünf deutsche Tänze,” you will turn up a host of music from Schubert, Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, mixed in with the folk recordings of Bavaria, Rhineland, and beyond. Gehlhaar’s subject is broader than spatialized sound. Where does German culture – and its antiquated, folk-danced, lived traditions – fit within a technologizing, modernizing world?

John McGuire

John McGuire’s (b. 1942) “Pulse Music III“ (1978) pushed further into minimalism. Shimmering, twinkling sounds sparkle above steady organ chords. A deep bass drone is felt in the gut more than heard in the ear. With each change of texture – they happen every couple of minutes – we’re dropped into a new sonic fabric. Change is welcome, because the sounds weave together tongue-in-groove, like cogs meshing in a machine. We sit on the drone as if it were a magic carpet, cruising, surveying the twinkling sounds at varying levels of remove. McGuire, an American composer who lived and worked in Utrecht and then Köln from 1970 until 1998, translated the feeling of looking from different angles. Is this what it is like to be inside the machine, hearing the information highway unfold in three dimensions?

Gehlhaar and McGuire are early starting points for the electronic dance music that would define clubs and raves of the 1980s and beyond. Their beat-based grooves, with ever-changing pulses, grab the body more than the mind. Around the same time, disco DJs looped the breaks – the instrumental solo sections – of funk and soul music, building ongoing grooves to fuel the dance floor all night. These are the nascent beginnings of an EDM revolution, where disco and high art electronic music would converge.

Close to home, consider CAN, the Köln-based rock improvisers with a penchant for electronic experimentation. On “Future Days“ (1973), a sweeping, noisy soundscape settles into a groovy shuffle, drawing us into extended contemplation. CAN didn’t officially produce music in the WDR studio, but they were within its gravitational pull. Two band members were Stockhausen’s students, and all of them imbibed the studio’s noisy, experimental sounds. The WDR studio’s sounds reverberated far beyond its art music spheres.

Younghi Pagh-Paan

It took until 1994 for the WDR studio to confront its long-standing gender deficit problem. The first female composer commissioned in the studio’s forty-year history was Younghi Pagh-Paan (b. 1945), a Korean composer of mostly instrumental music, who produced “Tsi-Shin-Kut“ (1994). The piece draws from Korean shamanic traditions, acting out a ritual to pacify the Earth Spirit (tsi-shin) by stamping and dancing. Its electronic sounds are surprisingly small and gentle, diffused throughout the space in a four-channel setup, and complementing the bells, wood blocks, and various drums of the four-player percussion-only chamber orchestra. The electronics take center stage about eight and a half minutes in, when the instrumentalists pause and listen. Spatialized digital projections fly about the room – the sounds of the Earth spirit moving? – animating the unseen energy at the piece’s core.

Unsuk Chin

The WDR studio commissioned one more woman – another Korean composer and Ligeti’s former student – Unsuk Chin (b. 1961) to produce spectres-speculaires (2000) for violin and electronics. The recording is not commercially available, so it is hard to know what that piece sounds like. The piece was completed, but not at the WDR studio. You see, the studio was shut down – decommissioned – before Chin’s work could be fully finished. The technical work had to be outsourced.

Chin’s situation captures, in brief, the unceremonious ending of the WDR studio. Radio administrators decided, without consulting studio director York Höller, that the studio should be retired. There were many reasons: it was increasingly expensive to keep such a studio up to date, meanwhile increasingly easy for composers to make electronic music from their bedrooms. Changes in internal structure at the WDR – a reorganization in new music throughout – gave electronic music less dedicated space, time, and support. The studio’s esoteric machines were lovingly kept by Volker Müller, the technician, until his 2021 death. Meanwhile, music academies, galleries, and museums made plans that didn’t materialize. The current plan is that the City of Köln will mandate ON – Neue Musik Köln to re-open the studio as an integrated project with the Zentrum für Alte Musik (Zamus, Center for Early Music) as a new site for artistic production and exchange. The question of location has not yet been resolved. It will be a thrill to reconnect with the vintage equipment that defined the analog and early digital age. We will finally have a chance to revive the human-technology interface that has always defined the music of the WDR studio. Until then, we listen in earnest.