After months of collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the world exhibition in Osaka, Johannes Fritsch, Rolf Gehlhaar and David Johnson founded the Feedback Studio in 1970, an independent, private electronic studio in a rear building in Cologne’s Belgian quarter. The Feedback Studio Verlag followed in 1971, the first composer-run publisher in Germany; both saw themselves as an artists’ cooperative and an alternative centre for music. Fritsch, born in Bensheim-Auerbach in 1941, had studied viola and, with Bernd Alois Zimmermann, composition in Cologne, among other subjects; he was a member of the Stockhausen ensemble from 1964 to 1970 and taught composition at the Cologne Musikhochschule from 1984 to 2006. Most of the works on this CD were written before the studio was founded.
Fritsch understood live-electronic music as “a new type of chamber music” whose instrumentation includes electronic “elements capable of transformation” alongside traditional instruments. The “Duet” for viola, his opus 1, premiered in 1961 at the Keller-Theater in Cologne, is a violist’s duet with himself: the first part is recorded on tape, and the player shapes the second from the same material in response to what he hears; Fritsch plays it himself in a recording from the Darmstadt Summer Courses of 1962. In “Madrigal triste” for oboe solo and tape he translates the letters and syllables of the poem of the same name from Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” into the notes of a twelve-tone row; the tape, completed in 1964, transforms the sound of the oboe into “a sort of imaginary soundspace for the oboe”. The soloist is Lothar Faber.
The “Concerto da camera” for violin and 12 strings was commissioned by the Rheinisches Kammerorchester in 1964, a divertimento whose form resembles a three-dimensional zigzag: every ending is a deceptive cadence, until the last gesture evaporates into the inaudible. The soloist in the 1967 recording is Patricio Cadiz, conducted by Thomas Baldner, with Fritsch in charge of sound projection. In the “Partita” (1965/66) two contact microphones pick up the sound of the viola; three players alter it with controls and filters, and via two tape recorders, between which the tape runs for ten seconds, echoes are layered canonically on top of one another and heard from eight loudspeakers. The third part, handling tape and feedback, was taken in all performances and recordings by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the work’s dedicatee; the 1967 rehearsal recording from Cologne brings him together with Fritsch, Rolf Gehlhaar and Alfred Alings.
The “Ode” (1980) for percussion with electronics and tape, a WDR commission, is based on the first anthem of Confucius in Richard Wilhelm’s translation and unfolds on three levels: 16 East Asian percussion instruments, hanging on steel strings from a wooden frame and amplified by microphones and pickups; the pentatonic melody of the anthem, heard extremely slowly on tape, built from overlapping tambura sounds; and the text of the anthem, spoken by Dieter Wernecke. No connection between music and text was composed; according to the compositional idea, it arises “by chance” in the listener’s consciousness. Michael Ranta plays percussion in a rehearsal recording from Cologne, realised by the Feedback Studio together with the WDR Electronic Studio.