Lothar Voigtlaender - Situation of Electroacoustic Music in Germany Today, Three Years After The Change It is an honour for me to present the situation of electroacoustic music in Germany on the occasion of the International Forum of Electroacoustic Music here in Bratislava. I would like to do so in the form of "snapshots". A snapshot because things are in movement and various aesthetic directions and currents in Germany are colliding and meeting, especially concentrated in Berlin. From this perspective there are evidently two possible paths of evolution of German electroacoustic music - we could be facing a simultaneous enrichment of composers' work, aesthetic viewpoints, but we can't avoid, and I don't want to say this in a negative, that only a certain direction is being adopted. One reason I call this view a snapshot is that today is the happy moment, when the evolution of electroacoustic music, which already has a long tradition in West Germany, and the evolution of the past ten to twenty years in East Germany are meeting in a truly unusual way. I am not now going to describe the West German evolution, it can be read in any good encyclopedia. We are familiar with the school of Cologne, Stockhausen, the technical and compositional experiments of Darmstadt, which play an important role to this day, later there were the studios in Essen, in my opinion the studio in Freiburg deserve special attention, which concentrated on live-electronic. That is more or less the West German scene, that is at points very concentrated electroacoustic activity, which however, in my opinion, does not create any superstructural larger West German scene, but are in themselves very aesthetically concentrated. The development in East Germany, which because of the political situation only arrived at the genre of electroacoustic music much later, is something entirely different. We can take the year 1970 as a point of reference, but the actually starting point was in 1975. In East Germany, there were a number of individual attempts to found an autonomous studio for electroacoustic music, but it is no longer a secret that it was not considered compatible with the cultural politics of our country. These attempts were immediately stifled and the real opening up to the international scene actually took place later in the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. At this point it is necessary to make note of two studios which came to acquire significance for East German composers. And it is necessary to mention their names. Paul Heinz Dietrich was the first, who left for Warsaw where he was able to make his live-electronic instrumental work a reality at Jozef Patkowski's. Later he devoted himself completely to the use of elements of live-electronic and instrumental music and did not continue with tape-music, or - let's say - radiophone music. At this point I must mention a further source - Georg Katzer and Lothar Voigtlaender were given the chance to go to Bratislava in 1975 and it was here that the decisive impulse was given through Peter Kolman and the fortunate development of the studio in Bratislava, which kept up intense contact with the outside world, had successful composers in France, at the competition in Bourges, and these impulses were made available to the two of us. And yet at the same time we were very lucky, and that's why I am going into such detail, because this reference point, this point de depart was truly an initiating moment - very simply, both of us were lucky enough to have our first compositions receive honourable mentions and subsequently prizes at Bourges. I am referring to Katzer's Rondo and my Meditation sur les temps. These pieces took us to France. And here, and I must emphasize, far from the German scene, to which we then did not have direct access, we were introduced to the international electroacoustic scene in Bourges, we acquainted ourselves with the problems of musique concrete, musique programme, musique mixte, with all its multimedia variations up to experimental film. Special impulses came equally out of Europe and from overseas, we heard interesting projects from Canada, America, but also from Utrecht, Stockholm, Swiss and Dutch studios. They were impulses, I hope I haven't forgotten a single one, they were consequential impulses which influen We were fortunate in that our radio stations soon discovered that this art form, "radiophonic composition", tape music, composition leaning towards radio drama, intensive use of words, its marriage with music, which for us was not at all common at that time, is interesting and the radio opened its doors to us, commisioned us to create works, and we were able to work with these forms in thorough fashion. After a short period Georg Katzer and I founded "Werkstatttage" - a workshop of electroacoustic music in Berlin, which took place every year. We invited musicologists, who spoke to certain chosen themes and attempted to draw in the international scene and overcome a certain provincial narrow-mindedness. We had guests from Freiburg, from the studio in Bourges, Stockholm, I won't name them all - we invited Budapest, Bratislava, I remember exactly - Bratislava belonged to one of the first invitees, so that we could capture and document our roots and evolution. I have reached the point now where I can say that in unified Germany, in unified Berlin these two currents are meeting. The scene around Georg Katzer and myself has relatively grown. Georg Katzer found a studio at the Academy of Art and has raised a group of students, and to some degree we have had students in common. I have given summer courses on contemporary music in Gera, to which students from colleges in Dresden, Weimar, Leipzig, and Berlin, who didn't have studios at their disposition, were given the chance to work with electroacoustic music equipment in an intensive 8 to 14-day course. As is known, in West Berlin the studio of the Technical University began to have an emphatic influence, as did the studio at the College of Performing Arts, which has influenced electronic composition in the past decade with its specific aesthetic tendencies, which we have registered and acknowledged. So now we have the aforementioned meeting - but I must state that the conditions of the market mechanism and of capitalism, in a growth situation - undertaken by both German states has created extremely hard times for art. It has been left to itself, it must accomplish much with little money, as our predecessors were often required to do. It is - I won't say a miserly, but a hard and demanding time for art. I would like to say, however, that when we reconcile ourselves with the negative aspects and accept them as reality, manifesting our firm resolution to simply overcome them and turn to the positive side of things, we will discover with Martin Luther King that, "Every crisis has not only dangers but also opportunities". In this sense, the ideological abuse of art, as carried out by our old fallen regime, is forever gone, art is, as I have already said, left to its own devices and we hope and wish for Germany to make use of the opportunity afforded by this meeting of various aesthetic currents in t At the International forum of electroacoustic music I simultaneously have the opportunity to bring sound samples to the aforementioned considerations. I would like here to take the opportunity to congratulate the main organizers, Juraj Duris and Andrej Zmecek on the fact that this meeting has taken place. It is enormously significant for the development of Eastern Europe, that Bratislava, has taken this task on itself, and it documents the development which has taken place in this city and studio for decades. We are at a breaking point, a time when the danger that the development will be forgotten or trivialized is very real. Thus I don't see IFEM as merely a unique event, but as an extremely interesting and concentrated conference from a musicological standpoint, one which will help us document our own birth and past. Once again, it is thanks to Juraj Ďuriš and Andrej Zmeček that this festival has taken place.