‘Shaping Electronic Sounds like Clay’: The historical situation and aesthetic position of electroacoustic music at the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics

Abstract

Twenty years after the founding of the Karlsuhe ZKM | Center for Art and Media and its Institute for Music and Acoustics, we reexamine the institute’s position with regard to both aesthetic approaches and the 20 years of a reunified Germany. When the broadcasting corporations in West Germany decided to discontinue support for all of their electronic music studios except the Southwest German Radio’s Experimental Studio in Freiburg, the Institute for Music and Acoustics took on a special role that also had an impact on the course of music history in former East Germany. Together with the studio at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the Institute became a studio for electroacoustic art that served the whole of Germany, though financed by local funding from the City of Karlsruhe and regional funding from the state of Baden-Württemberg. One of the artistic themes pursued at the ZKM’s Institute for Music and Acoustics is the combination of instruments and voice with electronics, for both theatrical settings and purely concert performances. The aspect of real-time composition gives rise to a lasting alteration of the performance situation and the character of the work produced.