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In June 1955, Barnard College received a grant
of $9,995 from the Rockefeller Foundation for Ussachevsky and me to do
creative research in electronic music in Europe and America. I made appointments
by letter and overseas telephone with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales
de l’Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française,
in Paris and the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in
Cologne. . . . We were sent
long lists of people to visit, among whom were few musicians. I realized
that I would have to do background reading to communicate. I began with
Norbert Wiener’s
Human Use of Human Beings and Claude Shannon and
Warren Weaver’s
Mathematical Theory of Communication and found them
rather rough going for a beginner.
Representatives of the Recherches Musicales, with Bernard Blin at the head, met us at Paris’s Orly airport. . . . . The prevailing spirit was to mop up the rubble left over from World War II and to build a New World. It need not be brave—only new. Some wanted to fly over the rubble, others to destroy it with a well-directed assault of sound and light vibrations. The slogan seemed to be “God is dead . . . long live x/y!” . . . . . . . [In Cologne,] I asked Stockhausen if I could observe him working over materials in the studio. He answered that any fool could do electronic music, one needs only to know the permutations and logarithms. Properly chastened, I asked him about his previous training, and he said, “Oh, that’s all a thing of the past,” and I realized that God was indeed dead. I needed more electronic components for my ballet. Dr. Eimert assigned an engineer technician to be my assistant. To show me the equipment he played background music he had invented and in a few hours we had constructed components for my ballet that sounded so ominous that the people in the adjoining studio had to stop working. I selected these sounds by ear; my assistant was surprised at the very fine differentiations. The Cologne composers all made strange graphs and notations that they handed to him to be transformed into sound. There was no uniform notation, and he said he had learned how to guess his way through these homemade hieroglyphics. At dinner my assistant complained that for electronic music an engineer is essential but unrecognized. He said that although Stockhausen worked with logarithms and permutations, he came to the studio at night and adjusted sounds by ear. My assistant at Cologne was the first engineer I knew who had artistic aspirations. Now there are hundreds of them.
Otto Luening
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