Elektronische Musik
1950s Cologne-WDR studio practice: composed from pure electronically generated sounds, distinct from Paris's tape-based musique concrete.
What it sounds like
Elektronische Musik, in its strict 1950s sense, refers to music composed entirely from electronically generated source material — sine waves, white noise, pulse generators, filters, ring modulators — assembled by splicing magnetic tape. The aesthetic argument was that the composer could specify every parameter of the sound from first principles rather than starting from recorded reality (the path the Paris GRM took with musique concrete). Stockhausen's early 'Studie I' (1953) is a literal example: every event is a single sine tone of specified frequency, duration, and amplitude, placed on tape.
How it came about
The genre crystallised at the Studio fur Elektronische Musik des WDR (Cologne), founded in 1951 by Werner Meyer-Eppler, Robert Beyer, and Herbert Eimert. Stockhausen joined in 1953 and produced 'Studie I' that year and 'Studie II' in 1954. The studio philosophy was the strict opposite of Pierre Schaeffer's Paris studio, which built music from recorded objects; in practice Stockhausen quickly mixed the two approaches, most famously in 'Gesang der Junglinge' (1956), which combines electronic tones with the recorded voice of a boy soprano.
What to listen for
On 'Studie I', try to hear the individual sine tones — there are no instruments to recognise, so the work is in the placement and combination of pure frequencies. 'Gesang der Junglinge' is more accessible: it integrates a sung text into the electronic environment and the result reads almost as a dramatic piece. Listen on speakers if you can; many of these works were composed for four- or five-channel diffusion and lose their spatial dimension in stereo.
If you only hear one thing
Karlheinz Stockhausen, 'Gesang der Junglinge' (1956) — the canonical work and a remarkably immediate listen for being from the early 1950s WDR. 'Studie I' (1953) and 'Kontakte' (1958-60) for the strict-electronic side.
Trivia
Stockhausen's 'Gesang der Junglinge' was originally composed for five-channel spatial diffusion, but the fifth channel was lost in the studio fire of the 1960s, and most performances today use a four-channel reconstruction.