studying early music

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Studying Early Music

In Germany today, there are many opportunities in Higher Education to study early

music. In recent years, the understanding of the importance of "historical performance

practice" has changed significantly.

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The real value

and benefit toboth freelance

musicians

playingBaroque music the "baroque specialists" as well as to modern-minded

instrumentalists and singers are increasingly being recognized and acknowledged.

Starting at the beginning: the Bachelor's Degree in Early Music

There are some conservatoires that concern themselves mainly with the interpretation of

early music. Such departments often bear the name Institute or Academy and are

characterized by the fact that studies are anchored not only in instrumental or vocallessons, but also in music theory and musicology, all these elements playing important

and vital roles in musical training. Bachelor students emerge as fully-fledged,

professionally-qualified exponents of historical instruments (or as vocalists).

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The three main musicconservatories where a Bachelors

degree may be completed are in

Bremen, Leipzig and Trossingen.Other music schools are expanding

their programmes towards a

qualification in the subject, andthese are the Conservatoires in

Weimar and Nuremberg. Some

departments enjoy a special emphasis status and have clear advantages in that theyusually hold large stocks of music and a substantial library of microfilm with facsimiles

of the most important theoretical writings and articles. In addition, an instrumentcollection may exist too. The Early Music Institute in Trossingen holds 25 harpsichords

and four forte-pianos pianos as well as many loan instruments (oboes, clarinets, horns,violins, violas and cellos) which can be borrowed by students inexpensively.

Advantages of departments with special emphases

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Another advantage of larger departments is the number of lecturers: 40 staff teach in

Bremen, and in Leipzig, and around 30 in Trossingen. Thus, in these universities, the

diversity of approaches can address the broad repertoire of early music, and almost allcombinations are covered. Often works will be performed which call for large and widely

varying forces, and which in concert life would hardly be feasible. In addition to

teaching, there are also regular courses, workshops, along with other teaching activitiessuch as accompanying Baroque dance, historical tuning systems, and pastiche

composition.

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A new programme, BachelorBaroque Orchestra, will be

introduced from April 2012 at

the Institute for Early Music inTrossingen. This course is

unique in Europe: it is headedup by leading experts and examines orchestral literature from the Baroque, Classical and

early Romantic periods. International networks based on various collaborations areplanned so that theory can directly connect with practice in orchestral playing.

An additional qualification: Masters in Early Music

The majority of German conservatoires now offer a Masters degree in early music. The

task is not easy: students have exactly two years to understand an entire universe of so-

called historically informed performance practice (HIP). This requires considerableprior knowledge in this area, especially for wind and string instruments.

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Students who have already

occupied themselves with

contemporary methods ofstudying performance practice

can acquire with their Masters

degree an additional

qualification in the field. For this kind of specialised training, many universities havehired specialist lecturers. In addition to the special emphasis departments mentioned

above, a Masters degree in early music from Cologne, Freiburg, Essen/Duisburg, Berlin,Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg and Wrzburg is available.

The low-key solution: Early Music as a subsidiary subject

At almost all music schools which have appropriate specialist teachers, one can studyearly music as a subsidiary subject. Along with a modern instrument (or voice), it is

possible to pursue a minor in the field, which helps at a later stage those who wish to

study for a Masters degree in early music. Recently, various modern orchestras have


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welcomed those who audition and can show knowledge of HIP.

Why study Early Music?

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There is today no longer any

need to fight about therelevance and purpose of early

music studies. A single,

specific interpretation of a

score has, in recent years,moved to the forefront. Any attempt to interpret all the styles in the same manner is now

generally perceived as characterless and tedious. Even in modern orchestras and

ensembles, a sense of a single specific style has enriched and enlivened the music itself.Here, the contrast between current interpretations could not be greater: between the

doctrine of the affections of the 17th and 18th centuries and the new realism of twelve-

tone music there lies an interpretive tension, one which could not be more complex orrich. On top of this are the various national styles, especially those of the Baroque era.

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A wealth of information is growing

daily, not least because of constant

publication of studies and libraryholdings, some of which are also

available online and confirm the

plethora of approaches to musical

aesthetics. Moreover, so-calledearly music has long crossed the

boundaries of the 19th century. Justa few years ago, one believed that early music ceased with Bach or Mozart (the term

early music has already become a misleading one), and we must accept that we have

learned a lesson: even Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms and Bruckner sound vastly

different when played on historical instruments, especially where the aesthetics of the19th century are taken into account.

Prof. Anton Steckis an active soloist, chamber musician and conductor, and since 2000 Professor for

Baroque Violin and Director of the Baroque Orchestra of the State Conservatoire forMusic in Trossingen.

Translation: Graham Lack

Copyright: Goethe-Institut e. V., Internet-Redaktion

August 2011

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Location of sources and library holdings

Where the historical performance practice of music is concerned, nothing is moreimportant than to look at the original sources and library holdings. The hardships endured

by the beginnings of the early music movement regarding sources and the development of

a repertoire no longer arise, thanks to well stocked libraries and their network.

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The Federal Republic of Germany

enjoys a densely connected net of

well-catalogued and professionally-

staffed public libraries, where muchof the music of the 18th century is

kept, without any significant losses.Most institutions already work with

online catalogues. Orders of MS

copies, microfilms and CD-ROMs

are easily made and experience has shown that they may be delivered against invoice in afew days.

Printed music can be accessed via the international lexicon of sources RISM (RepertoireInternational de Sources Musicales), hand-written sources with the encyclopaedia Musik

in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG).

Courtly music of the 18th century

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In essence, it may be said, that the

compositions written for courtly

music purposes in the late Baroqueand Classical periods remained at

their place of origin, or have been

transferred to a larger librarynearby. However, we find for

example most of the instrumentalworks of Georg Philip Telemanns in Darmstadt, but these are almost without exceptionin diplomatic copies in the hand of the local Hofkapellmeister Christoph Graupner.

Telemanns autograph MSS wandered as it were to the State Library in Berlin, where

they are held today. It also owns the worlds richest collection of Bachiana, broughtabout by the skilled collection policy that has preserved here almost the entire uvre of

Johann Sebastian Bach, his sons, and composers in their immediate musical environment.
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One hardly needs to explain much about the case of Dresden: the way art was collected

by the Princes of Wettin meant that they were privately owned anyway and thus were

destined to remain in house. The precious collections in possession of the city wererelocated and managed to survive the allied bombing in February 1945 with virtually no

losses.

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The music of the MannheimCourt, however, can be found

in Munich. When Elector

Charles Theodore succeededon New Years Day in the year

1777 to what was now an extinct House of Wittelsbach, he took with him not only his

famous orchestra, but also the many art treasures, such as the gallery of paintings alongwith the music library itself. The remnants of these golden years for Mannheim are to

found not only in Stuttgart, but especially in the nearby town of Darmstadt. Of specialimportance was the relocation of the manuscripts from the famous chapel of Oettingen

Wallerstein to the University Library of Augsburg. Materials belonging to the Princes ofBentheim-Tecklenburg mainly printed ones in this case went to the University Library

Mnster.

Private libraries

In addition, there exist comparatively small, still private collections which also include

the music collection of the Counts of Schnborn in Wiesentheid, Bavaria and especiallythe collection of the House of Andr in Offenbach/Main. It is important to mention here

that their materials remain available today only with express permission of the family and

are by no means cheap.

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It is also worth mentioning that allBavarian libraries and their

holdings are described in the

excellent publication by Henle, and

that complete catalogues for themusic of Telemann and Bach have

been published, and that acatalogue of music held by the Berlin Sing-Akademie exists in general, music of the18th century is well documented in Germany.

Manuscripts of the 17th century

The same praise can hardly be expressed for the materials of the 17th century. On the one

hand, the majority of this repertoire is missing as a result of almost endless armed

conflicts in Central Europe (and thus the later Germany) between 1600 and 1700 (that


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which was not a victim of war was lost in unnecessary attempts to reduce stock). On the

other hand, all known attempts have failed so far to create a full directory of original

German instrumental compositions.

However, it should be noted that, in addition to huge losses, this repertoire has been at

least partially reconstructed: thanks to the wonderful Dben Collection inUppsala/Sweden, and its French counterpart, the Collection Brossard, as well as the

Bibliothque Nationale de France and the collection in Kromeriz in what is now the

Czech State (all are accessible by excellent catalogues).

It is remarkable that courts and monasteries encouraged their music to be shared. And

there came about channels of musical communication between Kassel, Dresden and

Stockholm. Connections existed too between Dresden, the formerly Habsburg Lausitzand the Moravian Kromeriz, as well as between various locations and the Alsace,

occupied in 1681 by France.

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At least the musical materialsthemselves were not lost, not the

case in Germany, unfortunately,

and may still be found in the threeplaces just referred to. One should

always be ready for surprises

nonetheless: the Herzog AugustLibrary in Wolfenbttel/Lower Saxony has a tremendous inventory of MS collections

from the 17th century, even if the breadth of its scope is only appreciated by various

insiders.

The history of a collection

As ever, when searching for that lost masterpiece, it is always worth looking properly

through all the known catalogues. The repertoire of the Bonn Hofkapelle at the time ofthe young Ludwig van Beethoven is one would hardly believe held in the Italian town

of Modena. Thus an important but unlikely issue comes to the fore: a collection and its

provenance history. This is where questions like What came when, and in particular whyto this institution? might well be answered. This is still not really applicable to the

majority of German libraries. The wrong turns taken by many a story of provenance are

truly innumerable in this formerly so fragmented country.

He who searches, finds

In German libraries there is certainly nothing more to found that might be classed asrevolutionary. The well-trained staff has searched in vain several times in fact for at

least 150 Bach cantatas no longer extant. The missing tiles in the mosaic that is the

history of music between 1600 and 1800 may nevertheless not be that uncommon:


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quaerendo invenietis (seek ye, ye who shall find).

Reinhard Goebelfounder and for 33 years the leader of the ensemble Musica Antiqua Kln, remains today

a sought-after conductor and speaker. His is a wide-ranging specialist knowledge on

performance practice as it relates to the modern symphony and chamber orchestra.


August 2011

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Cultural heritage simply bustling with activity makers of musical instruments inGermany

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A musical instrument made in

Germany has a good namearound the world. This applies

to the reconstruction of

historical instruments as well

as the construction of modern,top-of-the-range instruments. A variety of musical instrument collections has, moreover,

preserved the cultural heritage in the field.

No other country in the world has a higher density of museums with historical musicalinstruments. There are special museums in Berlin, Leipzig and Mark Neukirchen, and

there are large culturally or technically oriented institutions such as the GermanischesNationalmuseum in Nuremberg, the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Museum fr

Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. Even in smaller museums one often finds instruments,

which demonstrate part of a widespread musical practice.

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The website of the Committeefor Collections of Musical

Instruments in the InternationalMuseums Association,CIMCIM, provides

information about some 150

collections in Germany, which include a museum guide of musical instruments thatguarantees the reader easy access. Research funded by the European Union project

MIMO (Musical Instrument Museum Online) has recently found that more than a quarter

of the publicly owned European historical instruments are kept in Germany.


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In the heart of Europe

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Is Germany the country we mostassociate with musical instruments?

Or is it only the land of the

collector? If one thinks in terms of

musical instrument brands, doesone not tend to dwell on the Far

East or the USA? Where are the

German musical instrument makersanyway? The story of German

musical instrument making is characterized by turbulent ups and downs which follow

each other rapidly according to global demand and profound depression. As with themusic itself, Germany is also influenced in the production of musical instruments by its

central location in Europe. Over the centuries it harnessed the momentum of intersecting

trade routes and reconciled itself to inventing things anew before propagating the results

to the outside world.

The genesis of the clarinet, for example, took place in Nuremberg, after instrument

makers had begun to imitate French woodwind instruments. The piano was invented inItaly in the Europe of the 18th Century, but it took the famous Saxon organ builder

Gottfried Silbermann to develop the idea before it achieved any kind of breakthrough.

From a small state to a cultural centre

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Vienna, Paris, London, New

York: in the Germany of the19th century, divided as it wasinto many smaller states, there

was no similar cultural centre

capable of using new ideas ofinstrument makers. There was no way for the musical avant-garde to bring its audience

into fruitful contact with any kind of civic education. The export of the technology used

to make better instruments along with the knowledge gained in that process remainstherefore perhaps the most important historical feature of German musical instrument

design. Mozarts Viennese piano maker, Anton Walter, came from the vicinity of

Stuttgart. The real name of Guillaume Tribert, who stands for the modern French oboe,

was really William. Henry E. Steinway, who wanted to build the best pianos in the world,was called before his emigration to the United States, Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg. And

the modern flute, which Theobald Boehm had developed in 1847 in Munich, was only

accepted in German orchestras long after it had become the standard instrument abroad.

The flagship of German instrument-making and an important export commodity right up

to the Great Depression, was the piano industry, with its hundreds of brands. From thesplendour of high quality that firms of all sizes produced right up to an industrial scale,


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many businesses today especially mass producers in the Far East are now trying to

profit by providing the market models that have been bought in or simply have German-

sounding brand names.

A slow awakening

After the Second World War, the German music industry was never quite able to matchits earlier success. Mass producers in Asia and the United States had obtained an

unbeatable lead. This holds true today, not least in the field of electronic musical

instruments, which is fed more from a prosperous industry for consumer electronics and

computer technology than as part of instrument-making as a craft. After all, a 2007 studydemonstrated that 70 percent of German production is exported.

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The extent of the current

success is not to beunderestimated. At the heart of

this are the old and new centres

of musical instrument making,especially the Vogtland, that

nestles between Markneukirchen and Klingenthal. But mention must be made of a

centuries-old tradition of violin making in Mittenwald. Finally, after the Second WorldWar, there emerged a newcomer, from the Sudetenland, a tradition carried on by refugees

who set up shop in the busy town of Bubenreuth, near Erlangen.

Historic Musical Instruments

Outside the mainstream, one aspect of musical practice in the 19th century was todominate the first decades of the 20th century: instrument makers who dedicated their

skills to the recorder and the harpsichord revival of baroque instruments. Admittedly,these were still rather new creations, as are copies of historical instruments, but they gave

the go-ahead for todays so-called historically informed performance practice.

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As the knowledge of historical

conditions grew, the demandsof the players, along with

several manufacturers,focussed on instruments thatare constructed as closely as

possible along the lines of the original instruments in museums. Although historically

informed performance practice has influenced musical life today, the increasing numberof historical copies does not represent any kind of mass market. Apart from harpsichords

and recorders, which are produced in large quantities, the instrument maker still remains

in the workshop. This is where baroque trumpets, lutes and viols, as well as oboes,


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clarinets and bassoons based on 18th and, increasingly, 19th century instruments see the

light of day. Oftentimes, the customer initiates the reconstruction of a particular

instrument held in one museum collection.

A new orientation

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German instrument makers

wisely did not try to enter the

game of price-dumping and

loss of quality, a competitionso easily lost. Instead, they

reflected on traditional

measures of quality, relying on public appeal and the made by branding. They placedthemselves amidst individual customers and entered certain obligations that demand the

skills of the craftsman and business acumen, along with a highly efficient sense of

industrial enterprises that suggests a combination of solidity and modernity.

This positioning in the market demonstrates the nature of the musical instrument itself,

the price of which is a kind of lifelong personal companion. Unlike items in the consumergoods industry, musical instruments are not disposable items which are easily replaced if

damaged. Over years and even decades, an instrument requires expert care and at one

time or another, expert repair. Nationwide there is a network of over 1.200 instrument

makers who are connected to a music store or, as in the case of the local violin maker,work on their own.

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The basis for the high standard of

German musical instrument makingis a highly regulated and traditional

craft apprenticeship, that takes

place at one of three schools in

Ludwigsburg, Mittenwald andOelsnitz and which are connected

to Zwickau University where a

degree in musical instrumentmaking may be obtained.

Despite the conservative market position as a land of musical instrument manufacturers,superlatives may still be applied and top positions still exist. Thus in Germany, the best

bassoons are made, and the most prestigious piano actions. Europes largest piano

manufacturer is firmly rooted here too.

Frank P. Br

Musicology and German Linguistics He is in charge of the Collection of Historic Musical


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Instruments and the Branch Research Service of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in

Nuremberg.

Translation: Graham Lack


June 2011


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The Cologne School myth

The circle of composers who held sway in Cologne during the 1950s has often been

mythologised as a centre of the musical avant garde.

Under the leadership of Herbert Eimert and aided by the growing reputation of

Stockhausen, the WDR Studio for Electronic Music that had been established in 1951

developed into an international meeting place. Composers like Ernst Krenek(Austria/USA), Gyrgy Ligeti (Hungary), Franco Evangelisti (Italy), Cornelius Cardew

(England), Mauricio Kagel (Argentina) and Nam June Paik (Korea) all lived and workedin Cologne.

The key works of those years were not written by Stockhausen, but by Gottfried Michael

Koenig, who dominated the WDR Studio like no other as its technical assistant andhelped many composers create their pieces. The language and technology of early

electronic music found their culmination in his works, including Klangfiguren II (Sound

Figures II, 1955/56), Essay (1957) and Terminus I (1962), which are as radical as they

virtuosic.

Stockhausen and his impact

In retrospect, the impact of the Cologne School has been of significance at several levels.Firstly, the WDR Studio is regarded as the "mother of all studios". It became the model

for comparable institutions, among them Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berios

Phonological Studio in Milan (founded in 1955) and Jozef Patkowskis ExperimentalMusic Studio in Warsaw (1957), which also worked with sinus wave, noise and impulse

generators, tape machines, filters and reverb units. Secondly, Stockhausen, who was

regarded for a long time as the forms most important integrative figure, helped electronicmusic to gain international respect.

At the same time, there was strong criticism of his apolitical attitude and tendency

towards spiritualism, which he expressed for the first time in works such as Hymnen(Anthems, 1966-67) and Telemusik(Telemusic, 1969). Anthems, which Krautrock bands

like Can and Neuhave claimed as a decisive inspiration, was condemned by Luigi Nono

as a shoddy piece of nationalism; in 1974, Cornelius Cardew even raised the accusation,

"Stockhausen serves imperialism".Thirdly, many of the composers initiated into electroacoustic music at Cologne have

passed on and further developed the ideas they encountered there. Under the impression

of his tape studyArtikulation (Articulation), which he had composed in 1958 in Cologne,
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Gyrgy Ligeti intensified the orchestral texture ofAtmosphres (1960/61) into a turbulent

fog of sound based on electroacoustic models. Helmut Lachenmann also applied lessons

from his electroacoustic activities. He may only have written a single tape piece, but thenwent on to revolutionise instrumental music in the late 1960s with his concept of a noise-

fixated musique concrte instrumentale".

enlargeHerbert Brn, who taught at

the University of Illinois until

2000, interpreted theprocedures he had learned in

Cologne in the context of his

theory of socially committedelectronic music. And Gottfried Michael Koenig, who took charge of the Dutch Institute

of Sonology in 1964, reorganised this workshop as a kind of "criticism of the Cologne

Studio", above all introducing voltage control and computers.

Mauricio Kagel, who created the tape piece Transicion at the WDR Studio in 1963, hasdedicated himself increasingly to acoustic art since his radio play Ein Aufnahmezustand

(A State of Recording, 1969), applying the montage procedures of electronic music toworks with a narrative character. While the writer Ferdinand Kriwet, who cultivated close

contacts with composers in Cologne, produced a series of "audio texts in order to make

the graphic, multichannel qualities of documentary recordings fruitful in a literarycontext.

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Nor was musical life in the

GDR untouched byelectroacoustic music. After

many short-lived projects,Georg Katzer succeeded inbuilding up a studio at the

Berlin Academy of the Arts, although not until 1986 and then with machines and

materials that had to be obtained from the West, sometimes by clandestine methods.Technically, the studio was strongly oriented towards Western production conditions and

became a place of political and aesthetic subversion, creating works that countered the

normative reason of state with an individualistic, free-thinking poetics.

Bjrn Gottstein

works as a critic and moderator for the daily newspaper taz and the Westdeutscher

Rundfunk broadcasting company, among others. Has published numerous texts on thehistory of electronic music.

Translated by Martin Pearce

Copyright: Goethe Institut e. V., Online-Redaktion
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July 2006

Research and progress

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The most importantinnovations to which the

Cologne Studio gave major

impulses include multichannelcomposition.Stockhausen

gained acceptance for the idea

of"spatial music as an aesthetic paradigm with his four-track work Gesang der

Jnglinge (Song of the Youths, 1955/56) and the spatially conceived orchestral pieceGruppen (Groups, 1955-57). The spherical auditorium created for the 1970 World

Exhibition in Osaka gave him a concert hall specially tailored to this concept. Since then,"spatial music" has been a common compositional praxis, used for example in the 7-channel composition La lgende d'Eer (The Legend of Eer, 1977) by Iannis Xenakis and

the orchestral piece Quasi una fantasia(1988) by Gyrgy Kurtg. Fifty years on, the idea

is being popularised today as 5.1 Surround Sound, but more as a feature of the modernhome packed with media technology than as a way of listening to electronic music.

Josef-Anton Riedl found his way to a synthesis between pure electronic music and

"musique concrte" at an early stage in the sound laboratory set up in 1959 by Siemens.

The Siemens studio may have failed in its attempts to commercially exploit electronicpopular music, but a digital synthesis procedure, in which the individual parameters of a

sound could be saved on punched tape and retrieved with the help of a tape reader, was

soon developed at the generously equipped research department. Together with computerprograms supplied by the US telephone company Bell, this procedure provided the

foundations for one of the first computer-supported sound machines. The tape reader was

used extensively by Riedl most notably in his composition Nr. 2 (1963). Composerslike John Cage and David Tudor travelled to Munich to study there on account of this

apparatus.

Innovative potential of electroacoustic music

The genre of live electronic music that John Cage had called into life in 1960 with his

Cartridge Music" was imported in 1964 by Stockhausen in Mikrofonie I fr Tamtam,

Mikrofone und Mischpulte(Microphony I for Tam-Tam, Microphones and MixingConsoles). He pushed forward the live electronic transformation of sound in 1969 with

Mantra fr zwei Klaviere und einen Ringmodulator (Mantra for Two Pianos and a Ring

Modulator) at the SWR in Freiburg. This production led to the founding of theExperimental Studio of the Heinrich Strobel Foundation of the SWR in 1971. It was in

Freiburg that the studios director Hans-Peter Haller and the engineer Peter Lawo had

built the first "fully electronic sound control device for the movement of a source of

sound within a predetermined space" in 1970. This machine went down in history as
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"Hallers Crazy Crate 4" and later the "halaphon.

The "halaphon" was made famous by the ethereal, filigree sound that runs through all the

later works of Luigi Nono. Nono created twelve works in Freiburg between 1980 and1990, among them his epochal "tragedy of listening" Prometeo (Prometheus, 1981-1985).

The Freiburg studio has always had a double role: as both an instrument and a laboratory.

Today, historic works by Nono, Cristbal Halffter and Pierre Boulez are maintainedtechnically there and, where necessary, updated to ensure they can still be performed.

Furthermore, many live electronic solutions for specific works have been developed

jointly with composers in Freiburg: for the electroacoustic corset with which BrianFerneyhough surrounds the instrumentalists in his Time and Motion Study II (1976/77),

the spatial counterpoint that develops into a dialogue between the ensemble and the

loudspeakers in Emmanuel Nuness Wandlungen (Changes, 1985/86) and the complex

mirroring process conceived by Isabel Mundry for her piece Gesichter (Faces, 1997).This appears to have exhausted the innovative potential of electroacoustic music in

Germany for the time being. Pioneering innovations such as voltage control, which is the

basis of the"Moog and Buchla synthesisers", were invented in the USA. The

revolutionary FM synthesis technology was also discovered in the CCRMA studio atStanford University before going on to dominate 1980s pop music from Michael

Jackson to Front 242 in the shape of Yamahas DX-7 synthesiser. While granularsynthesis, "physical modelling and standard software such as "Max/MSP",

"SuperCollider" and the programs created by IRCAM in Paris have all been developed

outside Germany as well.back to articles

Bjrn Gottstein

works as a critic and moderator for the daily newspaper taz and the WestdeutscherRundfunk broadcasting company, among others. Has published numerous texts on the

history of electronic music.




[email protected]

July 2006

Outside the institutionsMany byways of electronic music were ignored for a long time by the historiography of

the field, which was hegemonially oriented towards the major institutions.

The most important artistic responses of the years after 1968 included the rebellionagainst the institutionalised studios and their monopolisation of the means of production.

In 1970, the founding of the Cologne-based Feedback Studio by pupils of Stockhausen

such as Johannes Fritsch, Peter Etvs and the Calcutta-born composer and programmerKlarenz Barlow triggered a paradigm change that called the legitimacy of the institutions
http://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/ned/rbk/eku/en1579164.htm#http://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/ned/rbk/eku/en1579164.htm#http://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/ned/rbk/eku/en1579164.htm#http://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/ned/rbk/eku/en1579164.htm#http://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/ned/rbk/eku/en1579164.htm#http://history.back%28%29/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/ned/rbk/eku/en1579164.htm#http://www.goethe.de/kue/mus/ned/rbk/eku/en1579164.htm#http://history.back%28%29/http://history.back%28%29/mailto:[email protected]


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into question and opened the way for independent electronic music, not least thanks to the

availability of cheap synthesisers.

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Since the 1970s, this tradition

has been continued by artists

like Heiner Goebbels andAlfred Harth. With their band

Cassiber, Goebbels and Harth

have used the montagetechniques of the audiotape age for agitprop tracks such as Berlin, Q-Damm 12.4.81. The

European Live Electronic Centre (EULEC) at Lneburg also deserves to be mentioned in

this context. Helmut Erdmann has been working at EULEC since 1977, achievingadvances in areas of music education such as the teaching of electroacoustic techniques

and experimenting with historic synthesisers like the EMS Synthi 100 to find new facets

of their sounds.

Research projects and multimedia works at the ZKM

Most of the electroacoustic institutions have lost their significance today. Many facilities

have closed, including the Siemens laboratory and, most recently, the WDR Studio. Oneimportant exception is the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Center for Art and

Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, which was founded in 1990 in emulation of IRCAM in Paris

as an "institute of unheard tones". The work done there has frequently crossed the line

between academic research and art initially under the leadership of Johannes Goebeland since 2004 under that of Ludger Brmmer. Whereas Freiburg has specialised

exclusively in live electronic music for many years, a wide range of research projects are

undertaken at Karlsruhe. The subjects include problems of data management like thoseFranz Martin Olbrisch had to overcome in 1993 in his radio installation FM o99.5, which

extended over a number of days.

The composer Mesias Maiguashca, who was born in Ecuador and lives in Freiburg, wasable to musically exploit his studies of the ways metal instruments resonate at the ZKM

when he elaborated his evening-long cycle Reading Castaeda in 1993. The ZKM

provided Nicolas Collins, Kaffe Matthews, Oval, Scanner, Anne Wellmer and Zeitblom

with a complex data network for their interactive projectsFiber Jelly and Remix (2000).The Institute for Music and Acoustics cooperates with other parts of the ZKM on

multimedia pieces such as the works of Kiyoshi Furukawa, who integrates images and

sounds together: as in his "chamber music with images Small Fish (1999) for computerand musicians and the interactive environment Bubbles(2000) he created with Wolfgang

Mnch.

Integrating acoustics and aesthetics

Open source applications of the kind used in works by Orm Finnendahl and others have

been promoted under the aegis of the annual Linux Audio Conferences held at the ZKM

since 2004. Composers such as Goebel, Maiguashca, Brmmer and Finnendahl belong toa new group of still young artists who are equally inspired by an academic ethos and

artistic ambitions. The links forged between physical acoustics and musical aesthetics are


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reflected in an exemplary fashion in the works and writings of Hans Tutschku, who has

held the position of Professor of Composition and Director of the Studio for

Electroacoustic Composition at Harvard University since September 2004. Tutschku hasprogrammed numerous applications that respond to the intuitive realisation of a score by

musicians and incorporate their physical gestures into the generation of sound.

Georg Hajdu, Professor of Multimedia Composition in Hamburg since 2002, has beensimilarly innovative, experimenting with microtonal scales and working on a networked,

interactive real time compositional environment. At the same time, Johannes Goebel has

been continuing the activities he began at the ZKM since 2004 at the Experimental Mediaand Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (US State of

New York), where he has primarily devoted himself to the musical potential and

consequences of new media such as the Internet. In addition to this, the tradition of an art

based on simple technology and liberated from institutional constraints has considerablyinfluenced electronic music in Germany.

enlarge

The pioneers of this current

include the Hamburg noisemusician and composer Asmus

Tietchens, who collaborateswith the Bochum sound artist

Thomas Kner in "Kontakt der

Jnglinge", using depth psychology and not a little humour to explore his own musicalsocialisation in radio transmissions of electronic music.

back to articles

Bjrn Gottstein

works as a critic and moderator for the daily newspaper taz and the Westdeutscher

Rundfunk broadcasting company, among others. Has published numerous texts on thehistory of electronic music.



Any questions about this article? Please write to [email protected]

July 2006

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studying early music

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