DESCRIPTION:
Studie I, electronic music (1953)

The composition was created in the Cologne Studio for Electronic Musik of the NWDR between July and November 1953. In the final stages of editing, Stockhausen commemorated the birth of his first daughter, Suja, on 25 September 1953 by inserting a "serially unauthorized" 108 Hz (in a phrase attributed to Richard Toop), "one-gun salute". The world premiere took place in Cologne on 19 October 1954 in the concert series Musik der Zeit, together with Stockhausen's Studie II and works by Henri Pousseur, Karel Goeyvaerts, Herbert Eimert, and Paul Gredinger.

The work was important amongst other reasons because it was made (as were the works by Pousseur, Goeyvaerts, and Gredinger) not with the use of (electronic) instruments, like the Trautonium or Melochord, but rather out of pure sine tones. For the first time, complete compositional control was achieved, even over timbre. The ideal was to produce each sound synthetically and thus separately determined in its details: The conscious organization of music extends to the micro-acoustic sphere of the sound material itself. It is serially organized on all musical. [wikipedia.org]

Art by Michael Moon