Ksenija Stevanović, musicologist and assistant to the director of the cultural programme at Radio Belgrade, told me during my trip to Serbia: « You can’t write a history of electronic music without writing a history of radio. » This sentence has had a lasting impact on this project and my work in general. I had to look more closely at radio stations. Radio institutions have acted as a matrix (French: matrice) for electronic music – in the sense of an organ (re)producing their parent institutions (like universities and private companies), but also as a mould containing the imprint of both the forms of this music and its underlying ideological foundations. The polysemy of the word matrix is enlightening. In archaeology, a matrix is the sediment surrounding objects and materials at an excavation site, while in landscape ecology, the ecological matrix denotes the dominant environment within which substructures – such as habitat cores, buffer zones and ecological networks – are studied.
Investments in electronic music studios were generally injected through parent institutions – universities (in the United States), private companies (Philips in the Netherlands or Siemens in Germany) – but a good part of European, Soviet and Japanese funding came through public radio stations. Aside from the two studios I visited, which were created later – the Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm (1964) and the Elektronski studio at Radio Belgrade (1974) – there are many other examples. The Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète (GRMC) was created in 1951 in Paris and later transformed into the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1958, all under the Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française; the studio for electronic music of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) was founded in 1951 in Cologne; the Studio di fonologia musicale at the Radiotelevisione italiana (RAI) in Milan, as well as the NHK studio (Nippon Housou Kyoukai or National Broadcasting Association) in Tokyo were both formed in 1955; the Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia in Warsaw originated in 1957; and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radiophonic Workshop opened in 1958. Those are the best known (from a European perspective) and the oldest. By the way, I couldn’t visit any of these studios because most no longer exist, except for the GRM, which remains very active and where I’d like to work someday. But it’s obvious that their shadow hangs over this text.
It should also be noted that the creation of these studios wasn’t a given, as management did not always see the value in investing in these new infrastructures. From a technical standpoint, these places also owe their emergence to the proximity of the equipment necessary for broadcasting. Oscillators, amplifiers, filters of all kinds, generators for white noise and waveforms were within reach. The technology was already in place, as well as technical knowledge. This was the heart of the broadcasting matrix. There were devices with inputs and outputs that could be connected to amplifiers and speakers. A bifurcation, even hacking, was possible. And it happened. Later, people would try to « fix » these sounds, record them.
In an interview with Aggelos Mitsios, composer and teacher at KSYME – Contemporary Music Research Center in Athens, I learnt that some American radio stations had equipped themselves with magnetic tape recorders in order to rebroadcast programmes according to US time zones. At the end of World War II, during the invasion of Germany by Allied forces, the US military was able to get their hands on stereo recorders made by AEG, as well as magnetic tape manufactured by BASF – the company that also financed and distributed the Zyklon B insecticide used by the Nazis in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek. You can find all of this on Wikipedia too. To get back to audio techniques, the Nazis kept their manufacturing secrets well guarded, and their radio recordings were the only ones to significantly surpass gramophone quality. Shortly after the war, with a bit of reverse engineering, the American brand AMPEX put its own version of the tape recorder on the market, advancing magnetic tape technology.
From an institutional standpoint, the rigidly hierarchical organisation of radio stations posed numerous problems. Jobs were scarce and staff in music and sound research had to navigate personal ambitions, fundamental debates about musical creation and composition, technical advances, audience expectations, bureaucracy and hierarchical pressures. Depending on their resources and purpose, electronic music studios enjoyed varying degrees of freedom. Some places had the luxury of focusing on research, while others also had to operate in a more commercial manner. But exchanges were numerous, conferences and seminars regular and ego wars and turf battles endless.
Anyway, all this to say that the birth of this music didn’t take place in the fertile soil of a subculture carrying emancipatory class ideals. On the contrary, it was music made for – and by – the avant-garde of the cultural bourgeoisie. This was music that came from above.