Chapter 2Early Electronic Music in Europe

Contents•Before the Tape Recorder•Musique Concrète in France•Elektronische Musik in Germany•Other Early European Studios

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• Prior to World War II, experiments with recorded sound were conducted by composers using turntable technology. Hindemith and Toch may have been the first composers to create works specifically for recorded media (1930).

• Musique concrète was the name given to early electronic music developed in France by Pierre Schaeffer (1949). In musique concrète, sound material primarily consisted of recorded natural sounds that were composed using the medium itself. Schaeffer created his first musique concrète using turntables, microphones, and disc lathes for recording and playing back sounds.

Chapter 2 Early Electronic Music in Europe

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• The availability of the magnetic tape recorder following World War II made the creation of electronic music more feasible and resulted in several parallel developments in France, Germany, Italy, and other European countries.

• The Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) was founded in 1951 in Paris by Radiodiffusion-Television Françaises (RTF), the French national broadcasting service. It was the first state-sponsored electronic music studio.

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• In late 1951, Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) established an electronic music studio in Cologne under the direction of Dr Werner Meyer-Eppler and Herbert Eimert.

• Their work was initially focused on a form of serialism produced as elektronische Musik.

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• The aesthetic approaches to electronic music by the Paris and Cologne studios were initially distinct, the French using only recorded natural sounds as source material and the Germans using only electronically generated tones.

• This distinction quickly dissolved as an influx of composers to both studios quickly began to assert their own ideas about the composition and content of their experimental music.

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• Along with Varèse’s Poème électronique (1958), Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) marked an important transition from the mutually exclusive aesthetic approaches of the Paris and Cologne studios to a more broadly stylistic and openminded period of electronic music composition.

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• The Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan encouraged much experimentation in the composition of electronic music and was noted for Berio’s important contributions to text-sound composition using the human voice.

• Other notable early European studios for electronic music were created in Eindhoven, Stockholm, London, and Munich.

Chapter 2 Early Electronic Music in Europe

8Chapter 2Abraham Moles vision of sound in three dimensions