https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1551-1957
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Abstract
This article is about Volker Müller (b. 1942), a German sound engineer who worked at the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne for approximately 30 years. I look into Müller’s training as a sound engineer at the Düsseldorf Sound Engineering College and his activities at the WDR studio as a way of expanding on West German post-war state’s building and cybernetics pedagogy. By complicating merely technical, operational and mechanistic views of the sound engineer’s role in the studio, I argue that Volker Müller embodied a particular culture of sound engineering and certain political and artistic utopias that resonate with broader political, economic, and pedagogical structures developed in the context of Cold War.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributor
João Romão is a doctoral student at the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and the recipient of a doctoral stipend of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BD/115760/2016). His dissertation Music and Technical Negotiations: A History of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music, radically reconceives the emergence of electronic music in postwar West Germany, approaching it primarily as an intersection of convergent cultures of listening to electronically generated and mediated sounds, as well as postwar state’s building. Between 2017 and 2020, he was affiliated with the ‘Epistemes of Modern Acoustics’ Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Since completing his undergraduate and master’s degree in musicology at the New University of Lisbon, Portugal (2013), he has been working in interdisciplinary and international environments on projects that concern the role played by sound and music in the history of science and knowledge.
Notes
1 Jennifer Iverson (Citation2017) has demonstrated that the first compositions of the studio authored by Robert Beyer and Herbert Eimert were very similar to an earlier piece by the sound technician Heinz Schütz: Morgenröte. Iverson draws on Steven Shapin’s concept of the invisible technician to argue that Schütz’s invisible collaboration with the early electronic music composers should receive credit (see also Shapin Citation1989).
2 Interview with Volker Müller by the author, Cologne, Germany, March 6, 2018 (hereafter Müller Citation2018). The translations of the interview are mine.
3 Tonmeister does not have a proper equivalent English. A Tonmeister is neither a producer nor a sound engineer. In Tonmeister’s educational programs, both the musical and technical aspects of music making receive equal attention. Although this concept was first developed in Germany, Tonmeister study programs can be found in many countries. About the migration of the term into the Anglophone world, see Borwick (Citation1973).
4 Hereafter, I will use the terminology Tonmeister and Sound Engineer while referring to the German Tonmeister and Toningenieur, respectively.
5 There was also a distinction between sound engineer and sound technician in radio stations. As the media historian Kiron Patka (Citation2018) shows, a power structure based on gender discrimination was the main factor in the distinction between sound engineer and sound technician in the early postwar period. According to Patka, in the technical departments of radio broadcasters, women could not aspire to become engineers and thus to operate the mixing consoles, for example—they were regarded as technicians and thus tasked mainly with moving cables and placing microphones in studios.
6 For a more detailed history of Friedrich Trautwein and his work at these institutions during the interwar period, see Donhauser (Citation2007, 67–126).
7 Trautwein to Neyses. Correspondence, March 5, 1950, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22865.
8 Trautwein to Neyses. Correspondence, April 24, 1950, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22865.
9 Trautwein, ‘Tonmeisterschule: Lehrplan’, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22865.
10 Trautwein, ‘Denkschrift über das Weiterbestehen des Tonmeisterschule Düsseldorf’, April 1952, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22865.
11 Neyses to Enkel, Correspondence, January 8, 1957, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22867.
12 Enkel to Neyses, Correspondence, Janury 18, 1957, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22867.
13 ‘Niederschrift über die Vorsprechung betr. die Tonmeisterschule des Robert-Schumann-Konservatoriums’, March 21, 1957, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22867.
14 At least since the 1920s, in Germany, the German Post Office was not only responsible for postal services, but also for the technical operations, research and development in telephony, telegraphy, and radio broadcasting (Wittje Citation2016, 138–139).
15 Hensel to Bismarck. Correspondence, June 20, 1961, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22826.
16 Dufhnes to Hensel. Correspondence, July 4, 1962, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22826.
17 Baur, ‘Die Toningenieur Ausbildung beim Robert-Schumann-Konservatorium der Stadt Düsseldorf’, November 23, 1965, Düsseldorf City Archive, 0-1-4-22817.
18 Bernhard, ‘Aktennotiz: Ausbildung von Ton-Ingenieuren an der SIS Düsseldorf’, May 2, 1966, Historical Archive of the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf.
19 These group of cyberneticians is usually associated with the development of the subdiscipline Cybernetic Pedagogy in West Germany (see Aumann Citation2009, 315–363, for an overview of the main topics and actors of this subdiscipline).