The Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio (German: Studio für elektronische Musik des Westdeutschen Rundfunks) was a facility of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. It was the first of its kind in the world, and its history reflects the development of electronic music in the second half of the twentieth century.
Founding On 18 October 1951 a meeting was held at the then Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in connection with a tape-recorded late-night programme about electronic music that was broadcast on the evening of the same day. Informed via a report on this meeting, the Intendant (General Manager) of the radio station, Hanns Hartmann, gave the green light for establishment of the studio. In this way, this date may be regarded as the founding day of the Studio für elektronische Musik. Participants in the meeting, among others, were Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer, Fritz Enkel and Herbert Eimert. Robert Beyer had been speaking of timbre-oriented music since as early as the 1920s. He thought the time was ripe to bring this idea to fruition. Fritz Enkel was the technician who conceptualized the first establishment of the studio. Herbert Eimert was a composer, musicologist, and journalist. In the 1920s he had published a book on the theory of atonal music, which had gotten him expelled from Franz Bölsche's composition class at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. Ever since his youth, he had stood on the side of radical musical progress and organized concerts with noise instruments. Eimert was the first director of the Studio für elektronische Musik. Werner Meyer-Eppler was a docent (lecturer) at the Institute for Phonetics and Communication Research of Bonn University. He had first employed the term electronic music in 1949, in the subtitle of one of his books, Elektrische Klangerzeugung. Elektronische Musik und synthetische Sprache. After the inventory he made in this book of electronic musical instruments developed up to that point in time, Meyer-Eppler experimentally developed in his Bonn Institute one of the basic processes of electronic music, namely the compositional creation of music directly on magnetic tape. At the end of the above-mentioned report the availability of the men Trautwein (Düsseldorf) and Meyer-Eppler (Bonn) was pointed out. Cologne lies between Düsseldorf and Bonn. In the early 1930s Friedrich Trautwein had developed the Trautonium, one of the earliest electronic musical instruments. A version of the Trautonium, called the Monochord, was created for the studio. Meyer-Eppler carried out his experiments in Bonn with a Melochord. Harald Bode had constructed this instrument and modified it according to Meyer-Eppler's wishes. A Melochord was therefore also purchased for the Cologne studio. The Monochord and, especially, the Melochord can be understood as precursors to or an early form of the synthesizer. Synthesizers played an important role in the subsequent history of the studio.
Beginnings
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