Episode 97
Crosscurrents in Elektronische Musik from Germany
Playlist
Josef Anton Riedl, “Studie 1b, 1a” (1951) from Zeitgenössische Musik In Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 3 (1950-1960) (1982 Deutscher Musikrat). Early example of German tape composition, categorized as musique concrète as it includes more than purely electronic sounds, but the edited and processed sounds of human voices and instruments (a harp, string bass) as well. But it’s the vocal utterances and the way they were edited for effect with unpredictable silences that makes this work stand out for me. Riedl completed this after visiting and hearing musique concrète in France. After that, the Cologne studio came into existence and provided a new means to create electronic music not with microphones, but directly through electronic signals on tape. Riedl switched from making musique concrète to elektronische music. Realization by Riedl in association with the Studio für elektronische Musik des Westdeutschen Rundfunks, Köln (WDR, West German Radio in Cologne). 5:34
Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Étude” (1952) from Elektronische Musik 1952-1960 (1991 Stockhausen Verlag). Realized by Stockhausen during a stay to ORTF, Paris, where he learned the basics of musique concrète, which is how he categorized the piece before working purely electronic music at WDR. 2:56
Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Studie I” (1953) from Elektronische Musik 1952-1960 (1991 Stockhausen Verlag). One of two purely electronic “studies” composed by Stockhausen at the WDR. His serialist approach dictated all aspects of the sound and he composed the works using a graphical approach to depict the shapes and values of the volume, duration, pitch, and timbres of the sound. “Studie I” is among the first works of electronic music composed entirely for sine waves. Although the means for creating “Studie I” are readily available today using computer synthesis, its composition in 1953 required much manual intervention and ingenuity by Stockhausen. “Studie I” was a completely serialized composition in which the composer applied the mathematical analysis of tones and timbres to the way in which he generated, shaped, and edited sounds for a tape composition. With electronic tone generators and tape recorders at his disposal, Stockhausen felt that it was possible to “compose, in the true sense of the word, the timbres in music,” allowing him to synthesize from base elements such as sine waves the structure of a composition, its tone selection, and all of the audio dynamics such as amplitude, attack, duration, and the timbre of the sounds. He approached the composition by first recording a series of electronic tones that met certain pitch and timbral requirements that he prescribed and then using serial techniques to devise an organizational plan that determined the order and duration of the sounds as he edited them together. 9:23
Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Studie II” (1954) from Elektronische Musik 1952-1960 (1991 Stockhausen Verlag). The second of two purely electronic “studies” composed by Stockhausen at the WDR. For “Studie II,” Stockhausen extended his experiments with sine waves begun on “Studie I” by exploring the use of attack and decay characteristics as elements of composition. “Studie II” is one of the first post-war tape works to have a written score, albeit a graphic one in which overlapping translucent geometric shapes are used to denote the occurrence of a tone of a given amplitude in a given frequency with specific attack and decay characteristics. For “Studie II,” Stockhausen defined a set of frequencies based on the same ratio, resulting in an 81-tone scale of tones divided into one-tenth octave steps. The loudness and attack characteristics of the tones were divided into five stages. Tones based on such equal divisions of the frequency spectrum proved to be more harmonic when mixed. Stockhausen recorded short passages of the given tones and spliced them together in a loop that could be played repeatedly. Th