Josef Anton Riedl, Studies

Studie Ib & Ia

Notes From Bestellnummer DMR 1007-09:

Josef Anton Riedl (born in 1929). As a boy he already began composing music for piano, organ, and voice, and later studied with Carl Orff. In 1951 he won a scholarship enabling him to take part in the "Stage International Festival d'Aix en Provence". "At it, Pierre Schaeffer played recordings of his first Musique conrete works. I was so impressed that in the following autumn I visited him in his studio in Paris in order to find out more about his productions and the technical equipment of the studio etc. After that, with 4 old Telefunken tape recorders (from the "PädagogischeArbeitsstätte" in Munich) 2 ring-modulators and band-pass filters, 1 microphone and 1 tape recorder, which was (only) used for the mechanical generation of a sound, I produced Studie I, and, using elements of this study in a different manner (order, omission) together with some harp notes ("drops of sound") and vocal sounds (processed by cutting of the tape), Studie II." The first performance was in Munich in 1956. In 1981, using the original tapes of the 2 "Studies" (in combination with "Lautgedichte" - Sound Poems), the composer produced a technically new mix for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR).

At the beginning of the 1950's, an independent development in tape music, which was to become famous as "electronic music", began in Germany. On 18th October 1951, the WDR in Cologne broadcast a programme entitled "The World of Sound of Electronic Music". Those taking part were Herbert Eimert (director of the late-night music programme), his assistant Robert Beyer, Friedrich Trautwein (the inventor of the trautonium), and Werner Meyer-Eppler. The sound models presented had been produced by the acoustician Meyer-Eppler at the "Institut für Phonetik und Kommunikationsforschung" of the University of Bonn. The sounds had not been picked up by microphone, but had been electronically generated and transformed. The sound source was a melochord, an electronic melodic keyboard instrument with two independent means of sound control, invented by Bode in 1940. The instrument had already been used for years conventionally for plays and music programmes on German radio, but now it was used with a completely different aim in mind: with the aid of electronic sound generation and transformation, absolutely new musical territory was to be opened up. It was a bold, but realizable plan, because it was solidly based on the scientific communications theory, from which the aim was to develop a new, modern theory of electronic composition defined in DIN terms (DIN = Deutsche Industrie Norm, or German Industrial Standards); DIN 1320: note, note mixture, sound, sound mixture, noise, beat or click. This, then, was musical theory at the level of contemporary science, the exordium for "absolute" music liberated from the need of an interpreter. This was the stand taken by the scientist Meyer-Eppler. The musician Herbert Eimert saw things in a different light. "The composer is faced with the task of creating ordered relationships and firm formal patterns in this new, unlimited realm of sound. There are direct links to the situation of the latest 'abstract' music much of which has advanced to the limits of performability."