The Quartet from the Rhine

Stockhausen, of course. Who else. No one shaped the fortunes and history of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music as much as Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - 2007), who composed and realized his most important works here between 1953 and 1998 and who also served as the studio's Artistic Director from 1963 to 1977, then as Artistic Advisor until 1990. But there were also other international composers who worked in Cologne as important protagonists of a contemporary musical avant-garde. From the 1950s onwards, Cologne was one of the world's most important locations for new sound creations in electronic music. Exemplary for the multitude of artists, an insight into the life and work of four important composers who created and produced or played and premiered works here, also thanks to the sponsorship and support of Westdeutscher Rundfunk: an impressive quartet.

Even during the Second World War, he went to the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique and in 1948 took over as Musical Director of the …

For the young Boulez, Cologne marked the start of a great career during which, over the years, he gradually slipped from the role of composer into that of conductor. In 1966 he celebrated his first appearance at Bayreuth, where he conducted Parsifal at the Wagner Festival. From 1971 to 1975 he was Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and at the same time also of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, as the successor to Leonard Bernstein.

Even for his 85th birthday, he stood on the conductor's podium at the Wiener Musikverein for a celebratory concert with the Vienna Philharmonic. Pierre Boulez died at his main home in Baden-Baden on January 5, 2016.

It is easy to understand why the Studio was so close to the composer's heart, since he had such a lasting influence on it and its work. 

After studying Music Theory and the organ at the Klausenburg Conservatory, he later studied Composition and Music Theory at the Academy of Music in Budapest with Sándor Veress, Pál Járdányi, Lajos Bárdos, and Ferenc Farkas.

From 1950 onward he also lectured there, but the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 that was crushed by the Soviets changed everything. Ligeti fled to Vienna and then moved to Cologne, where he arrived at the train station in 1957 with 27 German marks in his pocket.

Ligeti's breakthrough came in 1960 at the 34th World Music Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music which had deliberately chosen Cologne as the venue because at that time, thanks to the WDR Studio, it was already regarded worldwide as a bastion of the musical avant-garde. To this day, the ten days from June 10 to 19, 1960, must be unique. There were a total of 16 first performances, including Stockhausen's Kontakte and Pierre Boulez's Pli selon Pli.

Ligeti was fascinated by the production of aleatoric music - music that is left to chance - and for his work Artikulation he put sound segments together unsystematically and randomly, even using a shoebox and throwing clips of tape in there to be glued together. Gottfried Michael Koenig, who assisted in the process, said Ligeti was obsessed with shaking up the box, like they do at the draw for a football cup, mixing up the clips of tape to underline the randomization principle.

Even though he later concentrated only on instrumental and vocal music, ways of thinking from electronic music continued to flow in here as well, as he emphasized in his 1970 essay Auswirkungen der elektronischen Musik auf mein kompositorisches Schaffen (Effects of electronic music on my compositional work). Again and again Ligeti, who lived in Hamburg and Berlin, later returned to Cologne. In 1976 he wrote the work "Three Pieces" for two pianos, commissioned by the WDR, "Hungarian Rock" (1978) and his Violin Concerto (1990 - 1992). He still celebrated a triumph in 1997 at the Salzburg Festival with a premiere of his newly staged only opera "Le Grand Macabre".


Even in his later years, Ligeti was still attempting daring innovations, for example in his Horn Concerto, which was first performed in 2001, he tried to produce new overtone relationships by mixing equal tempered and just tuning. That year also saw a rift with his old companion-in-arms Stockhausen, who had caused irritation with his bizarre remarks about the terrorist attacks on 9/11 ("the biggest work of art there has ever been …"), with the result that Ligeti clearly distanced himself from him afterward.

The composer died at the age 83 in Vienna on June 12, 2006, after a long illness. "In a time that is leveling all the hard and fast norms in art, he undoubtedly succeeded in recreating something of our current attitude to life in his music," wrote the Neue Züricher Zeitung in an obituary.

Kagel would probably never have dreamed that Cologne would become the focal point of his life, and that he would live there for over half a century until his death. From 1969 he was Director of the Institute for New Music at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne and also ran the Cologne Courses for New Music. He was co-founder of the Cologne Ensemble for New Music, and in 1975 he became Professor of New Musical Theater at the Cologne University of Music.

For other critics, Kagel's works were too simple, too banal, too irrelevant.

Especially in its early years, the Studio became almost a kind of artists' commune and many musicians used to meet up there who had nothing to do with electronic music and wanted nothing to do with it. The Studio was a place for debate and discussion, sharing ideas and getting together. In an interview in 2001, Koenig said: "I sometimes think back longingly to the ten golden years in Cologne." 

Incidentally, Terminus II / Funktion Grün, which was produced in 1967, was later included in The Wire's legendary list of 100 Records That Set the World on Fire (While No One Was Listening). Koenig once described in a TV documentary just how complex and complicated and, above all, how incredibly time-consuming it was at the time to turn compositions into a work that could be listened to, when he said: "Sometimes we would spend two weeks producing a 10-second sequence."

Following his time in Cologne, from 1964 to 1986, Koenig was Director of the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht. He is still an honorary member of the German Society for Electroacoustic Music.

Boulez, Ligeti, Kagel, Koenig. Four great sound artists from a great Cologne era.