"I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus"
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There is a quiet brag in Stockhausen's matter-of-fact phrasing: not the romantic artist starving in a garret, but the composer as full-time lab worker, clocking long hours inside institutions built for signals, not symphonies. “Most of the year” reads like a rebuttal to the myth of inspiration. He’s insisting that the future of music is something you engineer through proximity to machines, technicians, and infrastructure.
The context matters. Postwar Cologne wasn’t just a city; it was a nerve center for West German avant-garde reconstruction, and the radio station studio (WDR) functioned like a state-funded skunkworks for sound. In the 1950s, “electronic music” wasn’t a laptop hobby. It required access to oscillators, filters, tape machines, test equipment, and specialist know-how. Stockhausen’s line signals belonging: to a new class of composer with institutional keys and technical fluency.
“All kinds of electronic apparatus” also smuggles in a worldview. The vagueness is strategic, flattening the mystique of the tool into an open-ended arsenal. He’s not fetishizing a single device; he’s normalizing the apparatus as the medium itself. The subtext is aesthetic authority: if music is now built from circuits and tape splices, then the composer who lives in studios - who can treat technology as an instrument, not a threat - gets to define what “new works” even are.
It’s the sound of modernism turning production into identity. Stockhausen isn’t merely making pieces; he’s positioning the studio as the true stage of his era.
The context matters. Postwar Cologne wasn’t just a city; it was a nerve center for West German avant-garde reconstruction, and the radio station studio (WDR) functioned like a state-funded skunkworks for sound. In the 1950s, “electronic music” wasn’t a laptop hobby. It required access to oscillators, filters, tape machines, test equipment, and specialist know-how. Stockhausen’s line signals belonging: to a new class of composer with institutional keys and technical fluency.
“All kinds of electronic apparatus” also smuggles in a worldview. The vagueness is strategic, flattening the mystique of the tool into an open-ended arsenal. He’s not fetishizing a single device; he’s normalizing the apparatus as the medium itself. The subtext is aesthetic authority: if music is now built from circuits and tape splices, then the composer who lives in studios - who can treat technology as an instrument, not a threat - gets to define what “new works” even are.
It’s the sound of modernism turning production into identity. Stockhausen isn’t merely making pieces; he’s positioning the studio as the true stage of his era.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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