Electronic Music from Germany – Review

It may be surprising to begin a survey of electronic music in Germany a good hundred years before West Bam or the Love Parade. Yet the coming to grips with technology and machines is not an invention of the pop era. Since the 1950s there has been a parallel development of electroacoustic art music as a genre in its own right.

         

Beginnings
 The beginnings of electronic music

At the start of the 20th century, it was already being hotly discussed how music could be designed for modern times.

Sub-cultures of the 1960s
 Avant garde and popular music

The newly emerged youth and sub-cultures of the 1960’s entered popular music – popular culture and the avant garde met beyond the mainstream.

electro-pop of the 1970s
 Self-stylising as machines:
electro-pop of the 1970s

The Düsseldorf band Kraftwerk apparently became acquainted with each other at one of the early Can sessions and, beginning in 1970, produced at first minimalist and electronic-inspired avant garde rock.

Inspirations of the 1980s
 Post-Punk, Industrial and German New Wave:
inspirations of the 1980s

Exactly like Eloy, Nektar und Tangerine Dream in Germany, British bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP) or Yes also developed a propensity to the bombastic.

Stylistic variations of the 1990s
 The mass phenomenon "Love Parade”

With its 150 participants, the first Love Parade in the summer of 1989 was an insider’s rendezvous of the West Berlin scene.

   

Electroacoustic art music in Germany

Electroacoustic art music has largely gone its own way since the 1950s. Points of contact with pop music have remained the exception. In the institutional seclusion of the major studios, creative energy has not just been focussed on the works themselves, but also on research, experimentation and innovation. Unlike in pop music, which has always reacted rapidly and flexibly to new production techniques, it has usually taken years for technical innovations to become established in art music.  

    

Electroacoustic art music in Germany
 The Cologne School myth

The circle of composers who held sway in Cologne during the 1950s has often been mythologised as a centre of the musical avant garde.

Electroacoustic art music in Germany
 Research and progress

Experimental studios and sound machines: the development of aesthetic paradigms in electroacoustic art music.

Electroacoustic art music in Germany
 Outside the institutions

Many byways of electronic music have opened up outside the institutionalised studios.

Electroacoustic art music in Germany
 Building bridges to techno

During the 1990s, an experimental scene grew up in Germany under the influence of techno.