The history of electronic music at the Folkwang-Hochschule began, as Dirk Reith writes in the foreword, with three systems for live-electronic music which the college commissioned from the Berlin firm Hofschneider in 1970. They were played by an ensemble that had grown out of the “Gruppe MHz” under Günther Becker and from 1971 consisted solely of Folkwang members, Reith among them; in 1973/74 it dissolved as a permanent ensemble. In these years of new departures, work shifted from live electronics to the stationary studio, and alongside purely electronic sound generation the material of the human voice moved to the centre. Reith founded the Electronic Studio in 1971 and has edited the ex machina series since 1996.
The material of Hans-Werner Schneider’s “wenn ich auf einem Instrument spiele…” (1974) consists of the critical remarks of a dissatisfied concertgoer, who loudly offered his displeasure for recording. The basic techniques of tape work, copying, cutting, mixing, splicing and looping, create a self-negating self-reference whose central word is “Nein!”; in the loop, the sentence “das ist keine Musik” takes on an almost dance-like character. John McCaughey’s “Manche Lucias und Desdemonas …” (1974-75) was made in the Folkwang studio on quarter-inch tape, largely from recordings of workshops, seminars and a lecture given by the singer Carla Henius during her guest professorship. For the cut tape, processed with a VCS3 synthesiser, McCaughey wrote a live solo part for Henius; this theatre version was never staged, but it entered into the tape version, which he hears as a kind of choral music built from one person.
Max E. Keller’s “Sie” (1978) for Tape is at first an ironic advertising music for nuclear energy, which is never named in the slogans spoken by Hans Suter. Sequence-like processes run on top of one another and seem to head for a climax, but repeatedly lead into emptiness; what remains is a simple knocking, from which a different music develops. The sequences of the first part were created with a sequencer, new at the time, in the studio of the Musik-Akademie Basel; Keller largely improvised the second part at home on everyday objects, with contact microphones and an EMS synthesiser.
Dirk Reith’s “Entwurf eines Programms” (1974) was conceived in the spirit of an “extended seriality”. The voltage control system made it possible to programme the inner structures of music; Reith relates all acoustic materials and their control functions to square-wave functions, presents the basic programmes in the exposition and derives macro- and microstructures from the same “repertoire of signs”. As in computer composition, a musical problem is framed in such a way that it can be turned into a programmable process, here in an analogue system.