Music built from synthesised tones; the Cologne argument against the Paris school, and the studio that ran it from 1953 onward.
Elektronische Musik is the form of music whose primary compositional act is the synthesis of pure tones, generated electronically by oscillators, ring modulators, filters and the vocabulary of mid-twentieth-century studio apparatus, then assembled into compositions through patching, mixing and tape editing. It is the methodological opposite of F·01 musique concrète: where Schaeffer recorded the world and edited the recordings, the Cologne school built sound from acoustically simple components and worked from the bottom up. The patch is the score and the oscillator is the orchestra; this is the formal claim the WDR studio made in 1951 and that this file argues was made deliberately, in conscious opposition to the work being done at the same moment in Paris.
The founding event was a radio broadcast on the evening of 18 October 1951: Eimert's Nachtprogramm on Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, presenting the first synthetic sounds Werner Meyer-Eppler had produced with a Bode Melochord and an AEG Magnetophone tape recorder. The broadcast included lectures from Eimert, sound engineer Robert Beyer and Friedrich Trautwein, the Berlin engineer who had invented the Trautonium two decades earlier. The WDR Studio for Electronic Music opened formally in 1953, after two years of equipment-building and methodological argument, but the form's public announcement is the broadcast above. The first hour of music made entirely from electronically generated tones; the upstream tradition that runs alongside the Paris school for the rest of the century.
The form has three founders. Werner Meyer-Eppler (1913 to 1960) was the theorist: a Belgian-born German physicist and acoustician at the University of Bonn whose 1949 book Elektrische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und synthetische Sprache (Electric Sound Generation: Electronic Music and Synthetic Speech) supplied the scientific framework for the entire enterprise. His earlier work in speech synthesis at the Bonn Phonetic Institute provided the experimental methodology; his death from kidney disease in 1960, age forty-seven, removed the form's primary theorist before it had reached its mature decade. Robert Beyer (1901 to 1989) was the technical lead: the sound engineer who designed the studio's equipment and worked alongside Meyer-Eppler from 1951 onward. Herbert Eimert (1897 to 1972) was the organising force: a composer, music theorist and radio editor at NWDR who held directorship of the studio from 1951 until 1962, gave the form its first public broadcast and recruited the practitioners who would extend the work into the decade.
The world had now produced a different kind of sound material; the music had to follow. Karlheinz Stockhausen, on the early WDR method, paraphrased from interviews
The methodological argument with the Paris school is the form's central editorial fact. The two studios opened within three years of each other, both at national broadcasters, both pursuing electroacoustic music as a category. They disagreed about everything. Schaeffer held that the proper material was recorded sound from the world; Eimert and Meyer-Eppler held that recorded sound carried too much cultural baggage to be the subject of new music and that the proper material was acoustically simple synthesised tones with no prior associations. Schaeffer worked by reduction, editing recorded material until what remained was musical. The Cologne school worked by construction, building tones from oscillators upward. The argument was conducted in print, in private correspondence and across the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, where partisans of both sides met annually through the 1950s. Neither side was correct; both arguments produced bodies of work that the genre this archive otherwise covers depends on equally.
The convergence happened earlier than purist accounts admit. Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge (1955 to 1956) is the moment the methodological purity of elektronische Musik begins to dissolve: the work mixes a recorded boy's voice (the recorded soprano Josef Protschka, age twelve at recording) with synthesised tones. By the standards of 1953 this is a hybrid that should not exist; by 1956 the WDR studio had decided that the methodological argument was a limit on the music rather than a foundation for it and proceeded accordingly. The Paris school made the equivalent move in the opposite direction through the late 1960s as the GRM started using synthesised sources alongside concrète sources. By the early 1970s the methodological distinction had collapsed in practice; both traditions called what they did "electroacoustic music" and pretended the argument had always been a misunderstanding.
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 to 2007) is the form's central practitioner. He had attended a Cologne concert of Schaeffer's musique concrète in 1952, was provoked by it, joined the WDR studio in 1953 and produced the works of the form across the next twenty years: Studie I (1953, premiered 19 October 1954), Studie II (1954), Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56), Kontakte (1958–60), Hymnen (1966–67). He took over the studio's directorship in 1962 from Eimert and held it until 1977, by which point the configuration of European electroacoustic music had shifted away from the WDR's central role. The catalogue's commercial penetration is unusual for the form: Hymnen reached the cover of The Wire magazine and the listening lists of the rock musicians who would shortly produce the German prog and Krautrock catalogues that the late 1960s WDR studio influenced directly.
The studio's continuity has been, if more complicated than the Paris counterpart. The WDR Studio for Electronic Music operated continuously from 1951 to 2000 in its original Cologne premises, then survived a series of relocations and proposed closures across the early twenty-first century. In October 2023 the city of Cologne signed a transfer agreement with WDR to acquire the studio and preserve it permanently, ending two decades of uncertainty about its future. The original equipment is largely intact; the oscillators, ring modulators and tape machines that produced Gesang der Jünglinge are the same physical objects that visitors can see today. Seventy-five years of continuous unbroken thread, now publicly preserved.
The form's downstream propagation runs in three directions, distinct from but overlapping with the propagation routes of musique concrète. Forward into the European avant-garde, where the WDR studio's methodology was adopted by cognate institutions in Milan (Studio di Fonologia Musicale at RAI, founded 1955), Warsaw (Polish Radio Experimental Studio, founded 1957), Stockholm, Tokyo and Utrecht. Forward into Krautrock and the German electronic-pop tradition, where Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, the early Kraftwerk material and the Berlin School worked downstream of the WDR oscillator-based approach in ways the British concrète-inflected industrial tradition did not. Forward into popular electronic music's synthesis-based wing, where the ancestry of electronic dance music, of synthwave and of contemporary modular synthesiser practice all run back to oscillator-based method that the Cologne school established as a coherent compositional approach.
What this file argues for, finally, is that elektronische Musik is the form's *patch-based* tradition where musique concrète is the form's *recording-based* tradition. The two propagate forward into different downstream catalogues even after the methodological argument formally collapsed. Throbbing Gristle's method is concrète method; the early Cabaret Voltaire records mix both but lean concrète. The DAF and Kraftwerk axis works the elektronische Musik tradition explicitly. Clock DVA's era II records mix both. The contemporary modular-synthesiser scene is the elektronische Musik tradition's most direct continuation. Filing this form at F·02 is filing the second half of the form's foundational pair; F·01 and F·02 should be read together, in the order the Bureau presents them.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Late Anthropocene · last revised c. the Elizabethan era