Sounds of Cologne

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti called the relationship between New Music, Westdeutscher Rundfunk and the city of Cologne a "triumvirate". It was an inseparable connection that made WDR a pioneer in the development and promotion of an entirely new musical production process. For months, composers were able to experiment here for the creation of never-before-heard sound constructions, to fiddle with tape snippets and noise generators, to play with ring modulators and octave filters. 

The composer and subsequent Artistic Director York Höller (born in 1944), looking back to 1972, when he created his work Horizonte here, said that he had been determined "to work in a really concentrated way and not just play around with things, as might have happened at other studios, because he wanted to live up to the tradition."

Of course, people had been interested in designing and producing new sound structures, especially in connection with the new medium of radio, long before the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Even in the 1920s, radio stations and university institutes were open to the idea of trying out and developing new instruments and coming up with new technical and musical ideas. One example of this was the Radio Research Institute that was set up by the Prussian Ministry of Culture in Berlin in May 1928 and abolished by the Nazis in 1935. The Research Institute was seen as a laboratory for new sounds, but also carried out research into the sound film technology that was becoming popular in 1929 and into early ways of storing music on discs. Among the pioneers of electric music who came and went at the Berlin Research Institute were Oskar Sala, Friedrich Trautwein, and Paul Hindemith.

Participants in the October 18 meeting, who were key protagonists in getting the studio off the ground, included: Robert Beyer (1901–89), a radical innovator in the art of sound, had a vision of tone color music as early as the 1920s. The physicist and phoneticist Werner Meyer-Eppler (1913–60), who did a lot of work on sound synthesis and was the first to coin the term electronic music in 1949. Fritz Enkel, the technician who designed the first set-up for the studio. And, of course, Herbert Eimert (1897–1972), the musicologist who was thrown out of the Cologne University of Music for writing a paper on Atonal Music Teaching, but later became the first Director of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music

Eimert's first words when the first program The Sound World of Electronic Music was broadcast in the Musikalisches Nachtprogramm (Musical Evening Program) series on October 18, 1951 sounded like a warning: "Please don't be alarmed, the few bars that you have just heard are simply setting the tone for our evening program." That first broadcast was about the 12-tone theory in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus novels: explained on the piano. It was an indication that not everything that came out of the Studio for Electronic Music was simple fare and was not intended to be.

Serial music was a further development of Arnold Schönberg's 12-tone technique, the unwieldy soundscape of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Luigi Nono: of no use to autocrats. Advances in technology also opened up new ways of playing around with entirely new kinds of sound creation.

Herbert Eimert's musical interests were a good example of the expansion of 12-tone music with elements of serialism, as referred to previously. Eimert himself was in charge of the Studio for 12 years, until 1963. At the same time, until 1957, he also lectured on the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music. As a professor at the University of Music, he was also in charge of the Studio for Electronic Music there, from 1965 to 1971. He worked with Hans-Ulrich Humpert, his successor at the Electronic Studio at the University of Music, on a lexicon of electronic music. Shortly before the manuscript was finished, on December 15th, 1972, Eimert died in Düsseldorf.

… at the time they were still really sturdy, iron cans, and people smoked so much you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. It was a cross between the Florentine Camerata and a bohemian bar in Paris."

Gottfried Michael Koenig summed it up in a lecture in January 2000, when he said that it was no longer a question of writing down a note as a C, an F flat, or a G sharp, like it always used to be in music. Now a composer would say: "I need a sound at 483 Hertz," and the technician would set 483 Hertz on the generator.

But from the 1970s, the studio lost its monopoly position as a technological pioneer for the creation of electronic music. Other studios around the world were more modernly equipped, especially in view of the increasing importance of digital sound synthesis from then on. Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008), the Argentinian composer who came to Cologne in 1957, was later appointed Director of the Institute for New Music at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne and then succeeded Karlheinz Stockhausen as Head of the Cologne Courses for New Music (until 1975). He said once, looking back: "I was impressed by the fact that composing electronic music was regarded as an activity that deserved a permanent place in the program."

Even though other studios around the world may to some extent have been better equipped, with more modern technology, the Studio in Cologne never lost its huge importance as the pioneering center of the genre of electronic music.
In 1987, the Studio moved out of the main WDR building and into a building owned by the broadcaster in the Annostrasse, a few kilometers away. It remained in use there, by Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Artistic Director York Höller, until 2001.

In 2017, the search for a permanent home seemed to be over, and an agreement on a move to Haus Mödrath, Stockhausen's birthplace, seemed within reach, but the plans fell apart in early 2020. In an exclusive interview with "Google Arts & Culture," the former head of programming at cultural radio station WDR 3, Professor Karl Karst spoke about the studio's place in the history of music, its importance to WDR, and also about his hopes for keeping the studio in the long term. 

In the summer of 2020, Volker Müller gave an exclusive interview for "Google Arts & Culture" in which he talked about the special features of the studio, about his work and about important artists who worked here.