The history of the composition and performances of Violectra is inseparable from the history of the Feedback Studio. After working as Stockhausen’s assistants at the 1970 Expo in Osaka, the composers David Johnson, Rolf Gehlhaar and Johannes Fritsch founded the Feedback Studio in Cologne as an independent, private electronic studio; soon afterwards Fritsch and Gehlhaar founded the Feedback Studio Verlag, which came to include Michael von Biel, Peter Eötvös, Mesias Maiguashca and Michael Ranta. All of them were former pupils or assistants of Stockhausen. Until it was wound up in 2010, the publishing house represented some 300 compositions by 20 composers.
The first performance of Violectra took place in a concert of Saarländischer Rundfunk on 21 May 1971, together with compositions by Rolf Gehlhaar (Klavierstück 1-2) and Michael von Biel (Übungsstück für Cello mit gefilterter Rückkopplung). Christof Bitter, then head of the new music department, had made this guest concert by the Feedback Studio possible at his festival “Musik im 20. Jahrhundert” — help that certainly eased the entry of Feedback’s founders, then around thirty years old, into the public world of new music. At the Osaka Expo the young composers had earned well by their standards, and with it were able to buy the basic equipment of the studio and a VCS 3 synthesizer (Electronic Music Studios London). This synthesizer, important for the history of live electronics — it combined the basic functions of the electronic studio (sound generation by pulse, tone and noise generators, and sound processing by voltage-controlled filters and modulators) — is still used today for the ring-modulation circuit of Violectra.
The introductory text in the programme of the Saarbrücken festival reads: “Johannes Fritsch is concerned with the possibilities of improvisatory composition (reprinted in Feedback Papers Reprint 1-16, Cologne 1978, p. 48. )
After ‘Duett für Bratsche (1962)’ and ‘Partita für Viola, Kontaktmikrophone, Magnetophone, Filter und Regler (1966)’, ‘Violectra’ is the third work in which controlled improvisation on the viola is confronted with a complicated system of technical mediation.” The viola in this case is a six-string viola d’amore with 6 sympathetic strings from the early 19th century, which the composer discovered at a Cologne violin maker’s.