While the experimental scene was growing, exploring electronic music means, the research was going on within the more institutional contexts of the radio studios such as WDR (Köln, Germany), ORTF (Paris, France), Studio di Fonologia (Milano, Italy), BBC Studio (London, UK). In the 1940s, Pierre Schaffer had already started the Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the Radio Diffusion Télévision Française (RTF), where worked for almost ten years. A few years later, Karlheinz Stockhausen worked in the WDR studio in Cologne, and Luciano Berio was among the founder of the Studio di Fonologia in Milano, in which Cage spent almost a year, composing Fontana Mix (1958). In these contexts, electronic works were mostly recorded onto tape.
Karlheinz Stockhausen explored live electronic processing with his pivotal work, Mikrophonie I (1964), first premiered on December 9th, 1964 in Brussels. The piece is the result of Stockhausen's experiments, in the summer of 1964, on the large tam tam that he had previously bought for Momente. As the only sound source, the tam tam is excited with objects of different materials, such as glass, cardboard, metal, wood, rubber and plastic. All performed actions are amplified with a highly directional microphone and then processed in real-time. The six performers are divided into three symmetrical groups: the first two play different actions with various objects on the tam-tam, the second two manipulate the microphones, while the third pair modulate the microphones' sound with a filter and a potentiometer. In the score1 Stockhausen specifies different degrees of distance of the microphone from the tam-tam surface and from the point of excitation generated by the object used to play the instrument. Those parameters affect the clarity and the timbre of the sound, in much the same way physical location affects the sound heard through a contact mike. The difference between the sound input of the actual source, and its output through the loudspeakers, has been defined by Stockhausen the “microphonic process” (Maconie and Stockhausen, 2010, 78). Not even in the previous twelve years spent working in the electronic music studio, Stockhausen experienced such an unusual sound world. Maybe as a direct consequence, with the help of Jaap Spek, the technician at Cologne’s WDR radio, Stockhausen had started to use contact microphones (fig.1.7.1)2 to amplify metal and string sounds in many pieces of the same period, such as Mixtur (1964), Prozession (1967), or Kurzwellen (1968).3 The latter two were performed several times by the composer and violist Johannes Fritsch, who was part of the Stockhausen Ensemble (1964-1970), together with Rolf Gehlhaar. Fritsch and Gehlhaar continued to experiment with contact mics also after they left Stockhausen's group and formed the Feedback Studio (active between 1971 and 2001). Gehlhaar remembers Fritsch using a piezoelectric contact microphone model by Schaller for his piece Partita (1966) for amplified viola and tape delay:
Normally, when he played, he had the microphone attached either to the bridge or to the soundboard very close to the bridge. The position varied with what quality of sound he wanted to produce - on the bridge, brighter, sharper sound; on the soundboard, slightly more muffled, rounder sound. He was a very good player and his performances of Partita and contributions to the performances of Prozession and Kurzwellen by Stockhausen were of the highest quality. The Schaller contact microphone was very useful for installations and theatrical applications, where, for example one could be attached to the clinking chains that an actor was wearing as a part of his costume. In this context we did have to be careful due to their very high impedance. Consequently, the extending cable, its routing and the amplification had to be electronically very correct, otherwise a lot of noise and hum would be generated. Or several could be attached to the stage floor, to amplify footsteps for particularly dramatic effect. In the Feedback studio we experimented a lot with the contact microphone and various instruments as well as surfaces in our installations of the early 70s, where we would turn whole rooms and all the objects with them into musical installations. For this purpose I often found the contact microphone too sensitive or difficult to employ. I began to research other ways of amplifying objects, for example by hanging them on steel strings passing over an electromagnetic guitar pickup. This produces very interesting sounds. Another technique I developed for installations, was to employ piezoelectric emitters as microphones by placing small weights on them, one edge on the piezo, the other on the object to be amplified. This works very well (email from Rolf Gehlhaar - 28 April 2019).
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