Institute of Sonology (1960)
AI & Code
What is left for a composer if the structure of a piece can be calculated in advance? Here the answer came not in manifestos but in programs — and it raised several generations of computer music.
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In "Room 306" of the Philips research laboratory, the first electronic music studio in the Netherlands was put together — a hybrid of measuring instruments and homemade devices. It was April 1956, and for the industry this was an anomaly: management believed the money was better spent on compact cassettes, and the studio survived on the authority of one engineer, Roelof Vermeulen. The anomaly was tolerated, but kept away from the big jobs: when Philips built its pavilion for the 1958 World's Fair, Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique was recorded not here, but in a converted garage at a nearby factory. In 1959 Vermeulen announced that the music had outgrown the laboratory. In the autumn of 1960 the equipment moved to Utrecht University — and the Studio voor Elektronische Muziek, STEM, was born.
STEM spent its first years in a war of aesthetics: the conservative Henk Badings, the modernist Rudolf Escher and the radical Dick Raaijmakers pulled the studio in three directions. Order arrived in 1964 with Gottfried Michael Koenig, who came from the Cologne studio, where serial rigour had the force of law. From Bilthoven he brought a course of his own, the first to fuse hands-on work with equipment and the theory of composition, and he turned to computing machines — first the IBM 7090, then the Electrologica X8. His programs Project 1 (1964) and Project 2 (FORTRAN, ALGOL) calculated the whole musical structure. This was the birth of algorithmic composition: instead of splicing tape by hand, a score computed from rules.
In 1967 STEM became the Institute of Sonology, and its year-long course was the first in the world to include methods of computer composition. In 1971 the institute bought a PDP-15, and on that machine its programs for direct digital synthesis were written — POD by Barry Truax, VOSIM by Werner Kaegi, PILE by Paul Berg. Students came here from all over the world, and through all of it the institute held to Koenig's principle: music is the art of clear relationships, and surrounding the listener with loudspeakers "like machine guns" does not clarify structure but hides it.
In 1986 the Institute moved to the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where it works to this day. Since 2006 it has been led by Kees Tazelaar, a student of Koenig and a restorer of classic electronics: among the scores reconstructed here is that same Poème électronique — the piece once recorded in a garage because the Philips studio was not allowed near it.