Collaboration

In 1953–1954, the WDR composers began building sounds with additive synthesis, a process of layering and recording sine tones using generators and magnetic tape. The young composers, including Stockhausen, Goeyvaerts, Koenig, Gredinger, and Pousseur, believed that this meticulous work, carried out in accordance with their own serial, proportional schemes, would yield complete sonic control. Much to their disappointment, the sounds they produced were unsophisticated. Moreover, the process was tedious and time consuming. They turned to each other to voice these frustrations, discussing their perceived failures and collaborating on experimental solutions. Eventually, the composers relinquished total control, and instead found technical shortcuts based on the scientist Meyer-Eppler’s teachings on psychoacoustics, or perception of sound. The composers’ initial additive synthesis compositions were in some ways aesthetic failures, but useful ones nevertheless. Through trial-and-error, composers learned more about both the studio machinery and human perception. Their successes and failures also reached far beyond the studio, as composers such as Ligeti translated electronic inspirations into compelling orchestral music.

Introduction

The Westdeutscher Rundfunk [West German Radio] or WDR studio emerged in the early 1950s in Cologne, West Germany in a conflicted Cold War climate. On the one hand, electronic music signified social and artistic progress; avant-garde music stood as a reliable marker of democracy and freedom in contrast to Nazi and Soviet aesthetic mandates. On the other hand, technophobic audiences and critics reacted with skepticism to de-personalized, machine-mediated concerts, often regarding the new sounds with disdain. Nevertheless, cultural administrators, especially by means of the regional radio network, channeled funding to new music and the electronic studio as a way of rebuilding West Germany’s cultural hegemony. The WDR studio’s heterogeneity—its ability to incorporate and make use of several different types of resources—became a key to its success. The studio’s composers and technicians synthesized new sounds from scientific discourses. They reclaimed military technologies and long-standing musical lineages, opening up a new frontier. By embracing electronic music, West Germany found a way out of its decimated postwar landscape and emerged as a leader in the cultural Cold War.

Epilogue

Midcentury electronic studios drove the development of high art music, but also fed back into the cultural sphere in many ways, proving consequential in scientific, architectural, and popular music domains. The phonetics–music collaborations, for instance, were carried even further in continuing phonetic, linguistic, and cognitive research in Cologne and beyond. The integrated serial designs of the WDR composers, and especially their optimistic utopian dreams, inspired architectural plans for a rebuilt German city that would coalesce around art-making spaces. In popular music spheres such as film sound and rock music, the avant-garde music of the WDR composers, as well as new electronic synthesizers, had significant impacts. These rich cross-pollinations are due in large part to the heterogeneous, laboratory-like structure of the WDR studio, a structure that was replicated in the electronic studios that sprung up in the United States, Asia, and Latin America. In summary, the WDR studio had far-reaching consequences that were both structural and aesthetic. Cultural wounds were exposed and salved as electronic music began to make progress in reclaiming wartime spaces, ideas, and technologies. The impacts of midcentury electronic music continue to reverberate today.

Origins

In the early 1950s, the WDR studio founders articulated a guiding mythology: electronic music would be a timbral utopia, in which composers would finally have control over all aspects of the sound. In reality, the earliest WDR electronic works were little more than montages of radio-play sound effects. Studio technicians, working as invisible collaborators, produced the sounds, guided the technical processes, and even composed the studio’s first electronic pieces. Meanwhile, composers freely appropriated the technicians’ labor and creative ideas, thereby maintaining their authority over the studio’s first musical results. This dynamic of invisible collaboration, in which technicians provide essential tacit knowledge behind the scenes, is comparable to the culture of a scientific laboratory. As the vignettes in this chapter reveal, the WDR studio was a site for experimentation, collaborative creation, and hierarchical reappropriation.

Controversy

In the late 1950s, several European and American composers engaged in the aleatory debates, which ask how chance elements can be incorporated into music. The controversy was most famously visible at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1958, where Cage antagonized Boulez, Stockhausen, and other European composers. This chapter reassesses the who, where, and how of the debates. A series of analyses demonstrate that European composers hardly rejected chance interventions in their electronic and acoustic works. Whereas Cage, Tudor, Brown, and other American experimentalists hewed toward performer-centered indeterminacy, European avant-gardists such as Pousseur, Ligeti, Boulez, and Stockhausen experimented with open and mobile forms and statistical interpolations. In fact, composers debated together how to incorporate chance from a range of inspirations, including literature, linguistic theory, and phonetics. Aleatory experimentation on both sides of the Atlantic was highly conditioned by questions of human and machinic agency, as composers grappled with prodigious performers like Tudor, as well as with the technological limits of the studio machines and the materiality of magnetic tape. Electronic studios in both the United States and Europe were rich sites in which composers negotiated the terms of the aleatory debates.

Reclaiming Technology

In the transition from World War II to the Cold War, military innovations were domesticated and repurposed for civilian, scientific, and cultural advancement. Information theory is one such discourse—birthed from Shannon’s wartime cryptography work at Bell Labs—that burgeoned outward in a series of connected, interdisciplinary spirals in the 1950s. The WDR studio was a locale where wartime “technology” (defined broadly to include ideas) was reclaimed for cultural gain. After the initial experiments of the early 1950s, composers found themselves hemmed in by technological limits and unhappy with the serial, pointillist music they had so far made. Enter Meyer-Eppler, a former Nazi communications researcher turned phonetics scientist and electronic music expert, whose information-theoretic teachings helped composers solve their problems in several ways: to understand when their music had been too information dense; to incorporate gestures, approximations, and perceptible shapes; and to circumvent the technological limitations of the studio. The core concepts of information theory—perception, sampling and continuity, and probability—became the foundation for much mid-1950’s music from a range of composers in the studio and beyond. Working cooperatively, scientists, technicians, and composers participated in a process of culturally reclaiming information theory from its wartime origin, making it the conceptual foundation for 1950’s avant-garde music.

Technosynthesis

In the late 1950s and 1960s many of the avant-garde composers produced faux-language pieces—both electronic and acoustic—that took the continuum between speech and music as their primary interest. These similar pieces belie common sources of inspiration. In heterogeneous studios such as the WDR in Cologne and RAI in Milan, composers interacted with linguists and phonetics scientists, read James Joyce together, studied acoustics, and deconstructed recorded speech. The phonetics teachings of Meyer-Eppler, alongside demonstrations of technologies like Bell Labs’ Vocoder, provided much inspiration to avant-garde composers, who used both human and electronic means to isolate and re-create linguistic phonemes. In many of the works, Cathy Berberian’s voice became a particular fascination, serving to feminize and domesticate the provocative sounds. As composers navigated the messy nexus among humans, machines, music, and language, they raised important questions about what it meant to be human in a technologically infused Cold War world. Broadly speaking, the faux-language works performed neutralizations of military technologies like the Vocoder. However tenuous and incomplete these reclamations seem, midcentury electronic music began to recast Cold War technophobic fears.

Kinship

WDR composers drew from several sources in creating their electronic timbral utopia, including John Cage’s early works. His compelling prepared piano pieces provided a model for the new sounds of early electronic music by Schaeffer, Stockhausen, and Eimert. Furthermore, Cage’s square-root form provided a model for Stockhausen’s and Koenig’s handling of duration in their early tape music, especially because Cage embraced a proportional approach to pitch–time relationships. Although Cage and Tudor’s 1954 European tour to Donaueschingen and Cologne was partly a scandal, the pair were valued as celebrities by power brokers in the European milieu. Cage became more of a provocateur in the later 1950s, growing distant from the younger avant-garde composers. Tudor, however, remained exceptionally important as a nodal figure in the new music network, whose prodigious and consistent performances knit together the American and European avant-garde scenes in the 1950s and 1960s.