Six composers who lived and worked in Cologne around 1970 are at the centre of this volume. David Johnson, born in Batavia (New York) in 1940, had studied at Harvard, worked in the WDR electronic studio in 1966/67 and been a member of the group CAN in 1969; he was a co-founder of the Feedback Studio and its technical director until 1975. He realised “Ton – Antiton” from January to April 1968 in the electronic studio of the Cologne Musikhochschule. Systematically devised pitches, played by acoustic and electronic instruments, react with one another horizontally and vertically via various electronic modulators; three times the strict sound fabric is interrupted by contrasting interludes of metallic noises, speech and instrumental music.
Clarence Barlow, born in Calcutta in 1945 and a member of the Feedback Studio from 1973, realised “Sinophonie 1” in the same studio in the winter of 1969/70, predominantly from sine tones. The dynamics range from an extreme ppp at -40 dB to fff, and Barlow’s interest in imperceptible transformations is already evident here: a melody in persistent rotation gradually turns into a static sound. Silvio Foretic, born in Split in 1940, soon came to be regarded as the enfant terrible of Croatian music after founding his Ensemble for Contemporary Music in Zagreb in 1963; in 1966 he came to Cologne, studied with Bernd-Alois Zimmermann and Herbert Eimert and assisted Mauricio Kagel. His “Inter-Ludium” (1972) is a very short synthesiser piece on the tune of the “Internationale”, though in the minor: over a four-bar basso ostinato that recurs 16 times, the melody builds up and dissolves again, from today’s perspective, as the booklet puts it, a gloating song of mockery and a nostalgic obituary in one.
Peter Eötvös, born in Szekelyudvarhely in Transylvania in 1944, came to Cologne in 1966 as a DAAD scholar to study conducting and was a member of the Stockhausen Ensemble from 1968 to 1976; from 1966 he also worked for theatre, film and television. His “Feuermusik”, originally planned as film music, was created in 1972 at Studio Öldorf solely from the sounds of a hurdy-gurdy, which were filtered, modulated, transposed and layered. In his “Exercises” (1972-73), Mesias Maiguashca from Quito, who worked in the WDR electronic studio from 1968 to 1972 and co-founded the Gruppe Öldorf in 1972, has the sound of Günter Marx’s violin transformed by the VCS 3 analogue synthesiser, played by Ramon Schneider: as accompaniment and ornament, as an equal second voice, or so that it completely overshadows the original sound. From isolated but very homogeneous events, the violinist creates a continuous texture in “interpolating” improvisation.
John McGuire, born in Artesia (California) in 1942, studied at the University of Southern California and in Berkeley, took part in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Darmstadt composition studios in 1967 and 1968 and lived in Cologne for thirty years before moving to New York. His main works are based on extremely precise calculations of the pitch and rhythmic variations of a few clear sound shapes. “Pulse Music I”, his first electronic composition, was realised in 1975/76 with the sound engineer Marcel Schmidt in the studio of the Cologne Musikhochschule and premiered in Cologne in 1977. In a single 22-minute loop the music passes twice through the circle of fifths of pitches and durations, in 24 metric modulations in the ratios 3:2, 3:4, 3:8 and 3:16; in each section different phase durations are superimposed.