Acousmata

Pierre Bastien: “Musc exquis” From the album...

Mon, 21 May 2012 21:23:00 -0400

Pierre Bastien: “Musc exquis”

From the album Mecanium (1988)

French musician Pierre Bastien (born 1953 in Paris) is best known for the invention of the Mecanium, an automated orchestra in which a heterogeneous assortment of instruments is played by custom-made contraptions built from a sophisticated construction set called Meccano (known in the United States as Erector Set). Bastien traces the concept back to 1968, when he altered the sound of his metronome by placing kitchen pans on either side of the device. In Bastien’s words, “tick-tock” became “shpling-bonk,” and an idea was born.

A typical song features a short repeated pattern played by the Mecanium accompanying Bastien’s on his miniature trumpet. The resulting style can be described as quirkily melancholy mechano-jazz. (Bastien’s jazz influence is made explicit on this album in what is surely the strangest cover version of the song “Caravan” ever to be recorded.) Tracks such as “Musc exquis” show a more experimental side, and Bastien’s earlier work, under the title of Nu Creative Methods, is often quite noisy, though still based on a textural duality of mechanical loops and improvised material.

Interestingly, alongside his musical activities, Bastien has moonlighted as an academic, writing a doctoral thesis on the early-20th-century writer Raymond Roussel, whose idea of a “thermodynamic orchestra” driven by changes in temperature helped inspire Bastien’s project. The experimental musician/PhD career path seems to be a uniquely French phenomenon, also undertaken by the likes of Richard Pinhas and Jean-Marc Vivenza.

Like many other 20th-century artists, from the Dadaists to Jean Tinguely, Bastien plays with the imperfection of the machine, its capacity for unexpectedly transcending the intentions of its human masters. ”I like the way the machines don’t always play what I want. In fact, sometimes they play something better. They escape the creator in a way.”

Friedrich Kaufmann's Trumpeter-Automaton (1810)

Sun, 13 May 2012 20:47:59 -0400

“A visible hand crank controlled two spiral springs, covered by the decorative shirt,...

Jean Tinguely: “Sculpture IV” / “Sculpture...

Sun, 06 May 2012 22:28:00 -0400

Jean Tinguely: “Sculpture IV” / “Sculpture XII”

From the album Sculpture at the Tate Gallery (1983)

The Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) won’t be found in any history of experimental music. But his characteristic Rube Goldberg contraptions, often built from refunctioned industrial detritus, are as fascinating for their sounds as for their visual appearance. Each of his kinetic sculptures is a miniature symphony of mechanical noises, an enchanting ensemble of whirs, clatters, clicks, and clanks.

Tinguely’s most famous work, Homage to New York, was a huge assemblage that self-destructed in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Though such pieces can of course be read as a dark commentary on Western civilization’s industrial nihilism, Tinguely was no technophobe or Luddite. The target of his artistic critique is not technology itself, but its destructive role in the routinized, joyless culture of mass production and consumption. For Tinguely, the machine stands as a reminder of technology’s playful and generative potential: “The machine is above all an instrument that permits me to be poetic. If you respect the machine, if you enter into a game with the machine, then perhaps you can make a truly joyous machine—by joyous, I mean free.”

Meta-Harmony II (1979)

Tinguely’s form of mechanics is a “meta-mechanics,” which suggests an analogy with physics and metaphysics. From a machine one demands order and precision, reliability and regularity. Tinguely’s point of departure is mechanical disorder. In his early works, change and movement obey only the laws of chance. He pits the emancipated machine against the functional one and gives creations a glorious life of improvisation, happy inefficiency, and shabbiness, expressing an enviable freedom. (K. G. Pontus Hulten, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age)

This excerpt, and many more recordings of Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures, are available for download at the always amazing Continuo’s Weblog. As Continuo notes, the sound-world of these remarkable constructions can be compared to the (admittedly very different) work of Jean-Marc Vivenza and Pierre Bastien.

17th-Century Music Machines

Tue, 01 May 2012 20:55:14 -0400

In anticipation of returning to my dissertation chapter on the “mechanical music”...

James Whitney: Yantra (1958) Music by Henk Badings American...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:02:13 -0400

James Whitney: Yantra (1958)

Music by Henk Badings

American experimental filmmaker James Whitney created Yantra over a period of eight years (1950-1958) by punching pinholes in a 5” by 7” inch card and painting tiny dots on another card below; this process was repeated for each frame. Originally conceived as a silent film, Yantra was later paired with an electronic composition entitled Cain and Abel by the Dutch composer Henk Badings. The title of Whitney’s film is a Sanskrit word with a fascinating double meaning: it can signify either “instrument,” “machine,” or a mandala-like pattern, either real or imagined, which serves as an object of focus for meditative practice. This polysemic ambiguity is fitting for Whitney’s film, which employs modern technological means to create states of spiritual ecstasy.

A yantra is an instrument designed to curb the psychic forces by concentrating them on a pattern, and in such a way that this pattern becomes reproduced by the worshiper’s visualizing power. It is a machine to stimulate inner visualizations, meditations, and experiences… (Heinrich Zimmer, quoted in Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema)

Although James Whitney and his brother John were best known as filmmakers, they were also closely involved with electronic music. In 1940, they built an instrument in which swinging pendulums traced sine patterns onto a strip of optical sound film, allowing the superimposition of simple waveforms into complex timbres. (This instrument, which constitutes a remarkable precursor to later experiments with magnetic tape, was described by John Whitney in the article “Moving Pictures and Electronic Music” in volume 7 of the German modernist journal Die Reihe.) The Whitney brothers created a series of five stunning Film Exercises using this device in 1943-44, works which feature a radical and unprecedented combination of abstract imagery and synthetic sound.

Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni (Max Oppenheimer, 1916)

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 20:22:00 -0400

“At times, and in rare cases, a mortal is by listening made aware of something immortal in...

Tom Johnson: VI3 From the album Rational Melodies (1982) Using a...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:29:00 -0400

Tom Johnson: VI³

From the album Rational Melodies (1982)

Using a variety of compositional techniques based on mathematical and algorithmic manipulations, the American composer Tom Johnson has devoted his career to exploring musical analogs to fractal self-similarity, first described in the mid-1970s in the groundbreaking work of Benoit Mandelbrot. One simple example of this kind of technique is to define a set of rules for replacing individual elements with sets of other elements, and then applying these rules repeatedly to create nested self-similar structures. An excellent overview of Johnson’s compositional techniques can be found in his paper “Self-Similar Structures in My Music: An Inventory,” presented at IRCAM in 2006. Johnson has also described his methods in greater depth in a nearly 300-page tome entitled Self-Similar Melodies.

Johnson was a student of Morton Feldman, whose own highly idiosyncratic form of minimalism I have described elsewhere. You might not guess the master’s influence: while Feldman’s music is typically spare and laconic, Johnson’s is often playful and garrulous. Moreover, Feldman was famously dismissive of formalist and mathematical techniques of composition, advocating intuition above all. But both composers shared the desire to create music free from the dominant Romantic/expressionist paradigm— to create, in Johnson’s words, “something more objective, something that doesn’t express my emotions, something that doesn’t try to manipulate the emotions of the listener either, something outside myself.”

Excerpts from Symmetries, a series of graphic scores begun in 1979 and created with a musical typewriter

The pieces comprising the collection Rational Melodies are fascinating miniatures of algorithmic composition. Johnson’s music as a whole, while characterized by a thoroughgoing mathematical or algorithmic approach, is aesthetically quite diverse. Nine Bells (1979) is based on the ritualized movement of the performer in a 3 by 3 matrix of hanging bells. The maniacally systematic Chord Catalog (1986) presents “all 8178 chords possible in one octave.” In Music for 88, which features pieces such as “Pascal’s Triangle” and “Euler’s Harmonies,” various numerical phenomena are demonstrated at the piano, with the idea being that one can “hear” the otherwise abstract principal at work. Here the musico-mathematical connection-making gets a bit heavy-handed for my taste. Still, Johnson’s work contains some of the most fascinating investigations of algorithmic and formulaic compositional strategies of the last 30 years.

Rationality, or more precisely, deductive logic, has seldom been the controlling factor in musical composition. Composers are usually more interested in inspiration, intuition, feelings, self-expression. Lately, however, there has been a tendency for composers to give up individual control over every note, and rely on factors outside themselves. Pieces have been controlled by the wind, by chance, by the idiosyncrasies of tape recorders, or by unpredictable variations in electronic circuity, for example, and it seems to me that composing by rigorous adherence to logical premises involves a similar way of thinking.

Alongside his work as a composer, from 1972 to 1982 Johnson was also an influential music critic for the New York paper The Village Voice. His collected writings were published in 1989 as The Voice of the New Music, now available as a free download.

Bjørn Fongaard: “Elektrofonia No. 7 for Orchestra...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:45:00 -0400

Bjørn Fongaard: “Elektrofonia No. 7 for Orchestra Microtonalis,” op. 78 (1969)

From the album Elektrofoni: Works for Micro-Intervallic Guitar 1965-1978

Norwegian composer Bjørn Fongaard (1919-1980) was born in Oslo, where he studied piano and guitar at the conservatory before taking a teaching post in 1945. From the 1960s on, he concentrated his creative efforts on developing experimental techniques for the electric guitar, building up a substantial and highly idiosyncratic body of work in this unusual medium.

Like many 20th-century pioneers, Fongaard was driven to experimentation by necessity: he turned his attention to the guitar after the premiere of his 1966 orchestral composition Uranium 235 was scuttled on account of musicians’ difficulty with the composer’s unfamiliar forms of microtonal notation. (Uranium 235, a symphonic poem based on the frequencies of the overtone series above the 16th partial, finally received its first performance in 1999.)

In order to play quarter tones, Fongaard used a specially built guitar with double the normal number of frets. He also employed a variety of extended techniques, such as stroking the guitar strings with a bow or inserting various objects in between the strings to create a “prepared guitar” in the manner of John Cage’s famous prepared piano.

Fongaard’s music is highly distinctive, if not indeed consistent to the point of near-homogeneity. In his hands, microtones are not the material of an ultra-refined atonal counterpoint, as in the work of Hába, Wyschnegradsky, and many other composers. Instead, Fongaard’s music straddles the boundary between tone, noise, and silence. As Sam Davies pointed out in his review in The Wire #321 (November, 2010), the scuttling, vaguely insectoid sound of Fongaard’s playing sometimes calls to mind analogies with the roughly contemporaneous work of Derek Bailey and George Crumb.

Like many other composers who have used unorthodox systems of pitch organization, Fongaard viewed his exploration of sound as a kind of metaphysical quest beyond the confines of mundane reality. He spoke of the “N-Tone universe,” and compared the infinite possible divisions of the tonal spectrum to the unboundedness of the cosmos. For Fongaard, microtonal music bore the promise of something “unknown and mysterious” and issued a “breath of eternity” into the mortal world.

Laurie Spiegel: “Old Wave” From the album The...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 21:36:00 -0400

Laurie Spiegel: “Old Wave”

From the album The Expanding Universe (1980)

I’d been thinking about featuring the music of Laurie Spiegel for some time now, and Geeta Dayal’s recent piece on the surprising appearance of Spiegel’s 1972 composition “Sediment” in the new movie The Hunger Games convinced me that the stars were right for an ultra-rare Acousmata/pop culture tie-in.

Born in Chicago in 1945, Spiegel came of age as a composer in the 1970s, amidst the transition from old-school tape-and-scissors techniques to the digital interface of the computer. As a musical late bloomer whose early influences included shape note singing and the guitar playing of John Fahey, Spiegel felt ill at ease in the insular and often sexist environment she found at Julliard and other academic institutions. Reacting to these unfavorable conditions, she came to view the computer as an ideal medium for independent compositional work.

Spiegel was among the first to envision the computer as a tool of musical democratization, a new kind of folk instrument that allowed for decentralized musical production free from the constraints of economic and institutional forces. (Around the same time, the Italian composer Pietro Grossi and the Bay Area collective The League of Automatic Music Composers were also highlighting the political dimensions of the new creative technologies.) Speaking at the dawn of the PC era in 1980, Spiegel stated:

Ultimately, these little computers will make it easier to compose, as well as to play music. There are far too few people creating their own music compared to the number of people who really love music. It’s a much worse ratio than amateur painters or writers to consumers of those media, I suspect, and it’s because until now, there has been only a very difficult technique for composing.

Many of Spiegel’s works from the 1970s—including all the pieces on The Expanding Universe—were created using GROOVE (Generating Real-Time Operations on Voltage-Controlled Equipment), a pioneering computer music environment developed by Max Mathews and Richard Moore at Bell Labs in 1968. GROOVE allowed the composer to use a variety of interface devices, such as keyboards, buttons and knobs, and drawing tablets, along with a computer terminal, to shape musical data in real time. (Previously, making music with a computer generally meant an asynchronous relationship between the composer’s actions and the resulting sounds.) Spiegel used the real-time capacity of GROOVE to create music at once sophisticated and accessible, patterned yet highly differentiated—in her own terms, she sought an aesthetic middle ground between the two poles of serialism and minimalism.

Stay tuned...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 22:08:26 -0500

Acousmata will be on hiatus for a while as I focus my attention on my family and dissertation....

John Dowland: “Flow My Tears” (1600) Performed by...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:13:39 -0500

John Dowland: “Flow My Tears” (1600)

Performed by Valeria Mignaco and Alfonso Marin

Morphogenesis: Excerpt from “Improvisation...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:45:00 -0500

Morphogenesis: Excerpt from “Improvisation 11.11.88”

From the album Prochronisms (1989)

Formed in 1985 as a spinoff of a seminar on “New Music” taught by Roger Sutherland at City University in London, Morphogenesis was a collective of experimental musicians who developed a distinctive approach to collective improvisation. The group included among its ranks a number of veterans from the far fringes of the British musical avant-garde: Sutherland was an alumnus of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, Clive Graham was an occasional contributor to Nurse with Wound, and Michael Prime had worked with David Jackman’s project Organum.

Morphogenesis extended the “live electronics” tradition initiated in the 1960s by such figures as John Cage, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the performer/composers of the Sonic Arts Union. More particularly, they worked in the lineage of pioneering ensembles such as AMM, MEV, and Gruppo d’Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Like those groups, Morphogensis practiced improvisation using experimental sound sources to create emergent, highly textured musical performances. However, the group’s aesthetic is far removed from the spontaneous sensibility of its forebears. Their sound is darker and more concentrated, closer to ambient and drone than to the free-jazz influences of the earlier groups.

“The group’s aim is to unify and integrate many diverse sound elements, (electronic, vocal, instrumental and environmental) within a context of continual evolution and group dialogue. We construct some of our own instruments in addition to using adapted or prepared conventional instruments - usually violin, piano and acoustic guitar. The range of sounds are further extended by means of filtering and other forms of signal processing. Contact microphones are used to amplify the sounds of bubbling water and other small sounds. All these acoustic sounds are enhanced by electronic filtering etc. One electronic instrument we use is a bioactivity translator which is used to measure the voltage potential of living organisms — including plants, fungi, and the human nervous system — and translate the biological rhythms into electronic sound. Other electronic instruments include a 4 speed portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and a multi-speed CD player, both of which are used to work with short sound samples. We do not use laptops or pre-recorded material for playback.” [source]

The group’s unique sound derives from their characteristic use of synthetic and processed instrumental sounds to generate undulating sonic processes evocative of the primordial phenomena of nature. This biological/telluric coloration is reinforced by the group’s titles for its albums and compositions, such as “Deep Virus,” “Solarisation,” and “Entelechy.” (Some of these titles are inspired by the speculative scientific writings of the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake.) According to Prime, Morphogenesis sought to distance itself from the cerebral associations of avant-garde music, striving instead to address the auditor on a purely sensory plane: ”I don’t think any conceptualization is necessary to appreciate our music. The listener can easily relate to it on a basic level of feeling and emotion, an appreciation of interesting sonic textures and soundscapes.”

Erkki Kurenniemi: Computer Music (c. 1966)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:01:00 -0500

Erkki Kurenniemi: Computer Music (c. 1966)

Algorithmic Music for the Masses: WolframTones

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:00:00 -0500

Algorithmic Music for the Masses: WolframTones: A brainchild of British mathematician Stephen...

Area: “Mela di Odessa” From the...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:39:00 -0500

Area: “Mela di Odessa”

From the album Crac! (1975)

Active from 1972 to 1983, Area was a pioneering Italian group that creatively synthesized currents of American popular music such as jazz and funk with experimental tendencies in song form and sound production. Led by the Orphic incantations of vocalist Demetrio Stratos, Area featured a rotating cast of musicians anchored by the core group of Giulio Capiozzo (drums), Patrizio Fariselli (keyboards), Ares Tavolazzi (bass and trombone), and Paolo Tofano (guitar).

Crac! is Area’s third album, following Arbeit macht frei (1973) and Caution Radiation Area (1974). Although they disbanded within a few years of Stratos’ untimely death in 1979, the group’s early records earned them a spot on the legendary Nurse with Wound List, a hugely influential catechism of underground music circa 1980.

“Mela di Odessa” (The Apple of Odessa”) opens with a noisy burst of chirping electronic tones, atonal guitar noodling, and a raucous drum solo, leading into a driving jazz-rock texture topped by a piercing electric keyboard solo. Stratos’ trademark wordless vocalizations occasionally double the instrumental parts, leading through a frenzied labyrinth of improvised passagework. About halfway through, the mood changes quite suddenly, as the the drums and bass introduce a funky, off-kilter groove. Twittering electronic noise, Stratos’ spoken words, and brassy interjections—including a quotation of “Taps“—bring the track to a highly ambiguous close.

In his liner notes to the 1990 re-release on Cramps Records, Franco Bolelli writes: “To sink one’s teeth into the Area apple is to experience a taste which is neither the penitential taste of the avant-garde nor the tamed taste of the spectacle. Area has proven that the poetic and the experimental is not at all difficult and suffering. Indeed, it can be energetic and contagious.”

The App Store Instrumentarium

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:42:00 -0500

I recently bought an iPad for the primary purpose of exploring the device’s potential as an...

Louis Andriessen: Excerpt from De Staat (1976) From the album De...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:24:08 -0500

Louis Andriessen: Excerpt from De Staat (1976)

From the album De Staat

While the musical style broadly known as American minimalism comes in many flavors, from the cinematic ear-candy of Philip Glass to the playful psychedelia of Terry Riley and the symphonic bombast of John Adams, these various manifestations have in common a modal-diatonic approach to pitch organization and a tendency to eschew abrupt transitions in favor of gradually unfolding tone-patterns. American minimalism was intended (and in large part received) as a corrective to the overly “difficult” music of the mid-century avant-garde.

When minimalism made its inevitable appearance on the European continent, it took on a very different tone, one conditioned by the generally darker tendencies of European music in the postwar period. The premiere of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s De Staat in 1976 signaled a radically new take on the possibilities of musical minimalism. Jagged, angular, and suffused with lush dissonances that betray the composer’s debt to Igor Stravinsky, De Staat consists of the brusque juxtaposition of highly differentiated textural blocks (Stravinsky again) played at a consistently breakneck pace.

De Staat is written for an unorthodox ensemble heavily weighted toward winds and brass, plus the distinctive addition of electric and bass guitars. (Beginning in the early 1970s, Andriessen refused to compose for the conventional orchestra, which he saw as a symbol of the conservative musical establishment.) Four female singers intone snippets from Plato’s Republic concerning (ironically) music’s potential to disrupt the social order.

Ernst Krenek: Excerpt from Spiritus intelligentiae...

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:28:00 -0500

Ernst Krenek: Excerpt from Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus (1955)

From the album Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus / Klangfiguren

In the third and final installment of a series of posts highlighting the early productions of the West German Radio Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear one of the first attempts to blend synthetic tones with the human voice. Ernst Krenek’s Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus makes an interesting parallel with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s groundbreaking composition Gesang der Jünglinge, created around the same time.

Both compositions combine electronic sounds and vocal timbres, although Krenek’s approach in this regard was relatively traditional in comparison to Stockhausen’s. Both works were also based on religious texts—Krenek and Stockhausen were devout Catholics, and understood their works in the grand tradition of sacred music. Krenek even labelled his composition an “Easter Oratorio.” (This religious sincerity was lost on some critics: the German musicologist Friedrich Blume castigated such works as musical blasphemy in a controversial 1958 lecture portentously entitled “Was ist Musik?”)

Unlike most of the composers working in the Cologne studio in the 1950s, Krenek was a well-established figure in European modern music. Still, his Spiritus intelligentiae sanctus shows a youthful eagerness to explore the new possibilities presented by the electronic medium. Krenek tweaked the sine wave generators to create a slightly “squished” scale with 13 tones to the octave, instead of the customary 12, casting a strangely distended coloration over the music. The combination of pure sine tones, dissonant “tone mixtures,” and angular, ring-modulated vocal lines likewise contributes to an eerie and unsettling musical mise-en-scène.

Karel Goeyvaerts: Composition No. 4 with Dead Tones (1952) From...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:52:00 -0500

Karel Goeyvaerts: Composition No. 4 with Dead Tones (1952)

From the album The Serial Works (#1-7)

In this second installment of a series of three posts exploring the early productions of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, we hear a remarkable and little-known work by the Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts (1923-1993).

Composed in 1952, but realized in sound nearly three decades later, Composition No. 4 comprises a basic sound material of four tones, identical in pitch, timbre, and duration with each appearance. (Hence the “dead tones” of the title.) Technically, these tones are what were called Tongemische, or “tone mixtures”— that is, artificially generated tones consisting of sine waves in non-harmonic proportions to the fundamental frequency. The only variation in the piece is in the duration of the silences between each iteration of the tones, which is altered according to serial procedures. As the interjections of silence between each tone gradually increase and decrease over the course of the composition, the four sonic layers of the piece are brought out of phase and back into phase again. The result is a remarkable phenomenon of motion in stasis, a slowly shimmering stillness that musicologist Hermann Sabbe has anointed the first ever piece of “process music.” For Sabbe, “Composition No. 4” is also an early example of conceptual art, being based on a simple generative idea that could be realized in any number of ways. (Goeyvaerts did not specify the pitch of the tones, only their duration and timbral quality.)

In the early 1950s, Goeyvaerts and Karlheinz Stockhausen carried on an intense theoretical conversation concerning the principles of serial composition. Although the two shared a deep fascination with the technique, they diverged aesthetically: Goeyvaerts distinguished his approach from Stockhausen’s, calling the German’s music “baroque,” and claiming that he based his composition on a preconceived sonic image. Goeyvaerts, by contrast, envisioned music as (in the words of Mark Delaere) “the objectification of a spiritual idea in a structure of sound.” This distinctly modernist form of musical mysticism can be traced to such varied sources as the medieval concept of numerus sonorus—music as “sounding number,” essentially Pythagoreanism made into compositional doctrine—and the vision of a static, painterly “neoplastic music” outlined by Piet Mondrian in the 1920s. Delaere has called Goeyvaert’s early works “the most abstract compositions ever written.”

Goeyvaerts (middle) with Luigi Nono and Stockhausen (c. 1950)

Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer: Excerpt from Klang im...

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:34:00 -0500

Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer: Excerpt from Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (1951-52)

From the album Acousmatrix: The History of Electronic Music VI

Founded in 1951, the Studio for Electronic Music of West German Radio in Cologne was one of the seminal sources of the radical new sound art that emerged in the years following the end of the Second World War. Produced with pure synthetic sound, as opposed the recorded sounds of musique concrete, the works that emerged from the Cologne studio became known as elektronische Musik (“electronic music”), a term that consequently has a much more specific and historically fraught meaning in German than in other languages.

The WDR studio would become virtually synonymous with rigorously serial compositional techniques and a dry or even abrasive sonic quality, as exemplified by the now-classic early electronic studies of Karlheinz Stockhausen. But as Konrad Boehmer argues in his notes for this album in the Acousmatrix series, the various composers who worked in the studio over the span its first decade were anything but uniform in their approaches or their musical output. In the following three posts, I explore compositions from the early years of the WDR studio that demonstrate the rich aesthetic diversity of this music.

Eimert (above) with engineer Leopold von Knobelsdorff

Klang im unbegrenzten Raum (Sound in Limitless Space) is a collaboration between studio co-founders Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer. Eimert, who would later lead the studio for many years, was a well-established modernist figure in the Schoenbergian line, having published a handbook of 12-tone composition as early as 1924. Beyer, too, had come of age as a journalist and film composer in the heady days of the Weimar Republic. In 1928 he wrote a jaw-dropping essay of techno-futurist speculation entitled “Das Problem der kommenden Musik” (“The Problem of the Music to Come”), which both cataloged the technological achievements of the 1920s and prophesied many future developments.

While the WDR’s later sound would be marked by the use of rudimentary sonic material such as sine waves, impulses, and white noise, the early experiments in the studio made use of the harmonically rich timbres of electric instruments such as the Melochord and the Trautonium. Tones played on these devices were recorded and manipulated—spliced, multiplied, and bathed in artificial reverberation—to create otherworldly soundscapes unlike anything ever heard before. (In technique, if not quite in effect, these pieces resembled the works of “tape music” created around the same time in the United States by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky.)

This music can be heard as a realization of Beyer’s fantastic visions, recorded over two decades earlier, of “machines that make it possible to separate the voice from the body and convey it over distances, to let sounds play backward, to traverse a timbral domain of an almost cosmic expanse…machines whose power lies in their unique mastery of the laws of nature; a new objective, whose wonder lies hidden deep in the secrets of science.”