Studio für elektronische Musik des WDR

Founded in 1951 at Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (later Westdeutscher Rundfunk) in Cologne after discussions between Herbert Eimert, Werner Meyer-Eppler, and Robert Beyer, the Studio für elektronische Musik des WDR was the world’s first purpose-built electronic music studio. Eimert directed it from the start; Karlheinz Stockhausen took over direction in 1963, by which point the studio’s alumni also included Gottfried Michael Koenig and Bruno Maderna. Stockhausen composed Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) and Kontakte (1960) there, the latter built partly around a rotating table of his own design; sound engineer Volker Müller, who joined in the 1970s, maintained the studio’s equipment — including a custom-built Lawo mixing console, Telefunken Magnetophon 15A tape recorders, and an EMS Synthi 100 with vocoder — and its documentation through decades of relocation, first within Cologne in the 1980s and again to a basement location in 2001, before the collection was transferred to Stockhausen’s birthplace, Haus Mödrath, by 2019.