Ordinary sounds contain the deepest mysteries, and I started to follow some of them when I boarded the M21 tram at Frankfurter Tor in Berlin on January 14, 2017. The tram meandered through the streets of Friedrichshain in former East Berlin before coursing through the district of Köpenick, with its imposing industrial buildings, until it reached the Funkhaus in Nalepastrasse, where I had an appointment to meet Gerhard Steinke, a sound engineer and founding director, in 1956, of the sonorously named Labor für akustisch-musikalische Grenzprobleme (Laboratory for Border Problems in Musical Acoustics). The first of its kind in the Eastern Bloc, the laboratory was set up to bridge the gap between the aesthetic and technological dimensions of the emerging field of electronic music.

I met the eighty-year-old Steinke in the Milch Bar at the Funkhaus. Before long, however, he decided we had to move to another room with a more suitable acoustic environment for our conversation. I followed Steinke as he moved unerringly through the labyrinthine corridors— he had worked in the building since it had opened in the early 1950s—and eventually, we arrived at a beautiful room overlooking the River Spree. With my digital recorder running, we chatted at length about his role during the pioneering years of electronic music in the GDR. Amongst other things, Steinke told me how he had persuaded a North American composer to cross the Wall to record at his studio and experiment with a new electronic synthesizer they had just developed. Fascinated by the story, I asked if there was an audio recording of the exchange. He said there was bound to be one somewhere on the tapes he had donated to the Academy of Arts (AdK, Akademie der Künste) after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was this early conversation that made me realize that what I, as an architectural historian, was really interested in locating were the spatial traces of the interaction of buildings and sounds, as registered by recording devices—traces that are quite different from any written language and also distinct from the symbolic traces of orthographic drawings.

Taking up my quest for the elusive indicators of what I refer to as the architecture of radio—a form of architecture with unique spatial, technological, and political implications—I arrived several months later at the AdK’s archives, just next to the Charité Hospital in former East Berlin. After complying with the proverbial Kafkaesque bureaucracy, I was directed to a “reading room.” Except there were no written records to read. Instead, I found myself in front of a Magnetophon 15a tape recorder and a stack of quarter-inch tapes containing the traces of experiments conducted at the acoustic laboratory founded by Steinke. Those traces were potentially the only way I could access the sonic vibrations and reverberations produced by the objects and buildings I was investigating. Here, too, I found a means to experience the construction of space via this architecture of radio—a construction that emerges from the entangled relationships between building and electronic technical media, and is only intelligible through the sense of hearing.

Those tapes gave me a sampling of what the socialist acoustic space actually sounded like at the time. I listened, for example, to tests of wind instruments in Saal II in the Funkhaus on Nalepastrasse, taking account of the fact that those experiments had been transmitted as a collective lesson in teaching people how to listen. I heard lectures about the history of music and technology broadcast by the national station, Deutschlandsender, as well as programs produced by its sister institution, the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw. Equally, I listened to broadcasts from the West, from the RAI studio in Milan, among many others. I heard early compositions by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Herbert Eimert recorded in 1958 in a studio in Cologne, West Germany, and broadcast by RIAS, the radio station established by the United States in Berlin. The architecture of radio was something recorded and thus experienced on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

As part of that visit, I came across recordings of a piece of music in the lab’s archives at the Academy of Arts, and realized I had finally located the material traces of the East–West encounter Gerhard Steinke had described to me months earlier. “Zoologischer Garten,” by the US composer Frederic Rzewski, speaks directly to the presence of the Berlin Wall and to the ways in which the electrified space of radio was occupied and politically contested in the postwar years. In an account of the genesis of the piece published in the Swiss magazine Du atlantis, Rzewski describes how in August 1965 he began commuting across a divided Berlin almost every day, going to work on a piece commissioned by the GDR station, Berliner Rundfunk. The composer’s unsanctioned commute between East and West testifies, on the one hand, to the huge presence of the American cultural intelligentsia in West Berlin. But it is also a clear indicator that individual politics, and particularly the politics of artists, tend to be far more unpredictable than institutions would like to pretend.

Cultural diplomacy was a weapon deployed on both sides of the divide. The Russian-born composer Nicolas Nabokov—cousin of the writer Vladimir—had begun his tenure as secretary general of the CIA-sponsored Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF) in 1951. Ten years later, with the building of the Berlin Wall, he thought “the time was ripe to play Berlin’s cultural card, but play it ably and firmly on a broad, international scale.” Among the “cards” envisioned by Nabokov—and financed by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation—was the presence in Berlin of Rzewski, still in his twenties, but already with an international reputation as a pianist and avant-garde composer. Supported by the US establishment, but committed, from those years on, to the political ideas of the left, Rzewski described his daily commute as a “hardly-believable transition between two different worlds coexisting side by side.” His composition was conceived precisely to transgress the contentious divide constructed and mediated by the Wall—to be transmitted, via the electromagnetic field of radio, across all physical and political borders. He wrote: “Crossing the border at Friedrichstrasse could take … minutes or it could take an hour. The time I spent in the S-Bahn, and getting on and getting off the train at the Zoo station, must have imprinted on my consciousness a certain sense of duration and change, which, I see now, has become the actual material of my composition.” In East Berlin, Rzewski had access to a new medium of composition, producing sounds that would have been an absolute novelty for listeners on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The Subharchord synthesizer, which he described as “one of the major advances in the field of electronic instruments” and an “extension of the human body,” had been developed at the research lab by East German engineer Ernst Schreiber in 1961.

The synthesizer was assigned a specific (and pivotal) function: that of producing a new kind of sound through electronic synthesis and, with it, a new kind of acoustic space. The resulting musical composition is twenty-three minutes long and consists of six seemingly unrelated fragments bound together by the medium of magnetic tape. Based on the experience of confronting two radically different realities in East and West, it provides a prescient commentary on the early effects of the Berlin Wall at the scale of the city. Rzewski recorded how the Wall divided the city and simultaneously created contrasting proximities. At the same time, the technological, aesthetic, and political conditions under which the music was conceived made it possible for the work to transgress the Wall, going straight through it. Rzewski’s composition thus bears critically on other ideologically laden wall—those of radio buildings—which for too long have been overlooked. Some of the sounds presented here testify to the connections between the various institutional, mechanical, electronic, human and non-human actors related to making them possible. By doing so, they reveal the intricate relationship between buildings, electronic synthesis, and electromagnetic waves that open onto a media-archaeology of Berlin and its walls (including the Wall) in the age of radio.

Both Rzewski’s composition and the Subharchord synthesizer were constructed in the Labor für akustisch-musikalische Grenzprobleme. Like most of the equivalent laboratories in the West, it was dependent on radio institutions and thus functioned within a much larger network of local and global practices. Within the institutional hierarchy of the GDR, the Labor was part of the Rundfunk-und fernsehtechnisches Zentralamt (RFZ), which was originally set up as the eastern section of the Heinrich Hertz Institute in 1950, under the name of Betriebslaboratorium für Rundfunk und Fernsehen (BRF). The RFZ in turn reported to the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications.

It was under the auspices of this multipurpose institution that the Labor für akustisch-musikalische Grenzprobleme was founded in 1956. In view of the important political and aesthetic role that radio played in Germany at the time, the remit of the lab was, according to Steinke, “to research new aesthetic laws through unexplored sound possibilities, to study information-theory laws related to music, and to enrich the sonic means of expression in radio and television through developing a specifically radiophonic sound art.” In other words, this laboratory was committed to researching and fabricating the technological means of a new art, electronic music, devised specifically for dissemination through radio. Concurrently, it was the place where the aesthetic characteristics of this new art were to be engendered.

As such, the Labor was established amidst a global proliferation of such laboratories, most of them related to radio institutions. The pioneer of this new type of institution—which relied on people, as well as on the model envisioned by the so-called Rundfunkversuchsstelle—was the Studio für elektronische Musik, founded in Cologne in 1951 as an offshoot of NWDR (Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk). It was followed, within less than a decade, by the creation of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris (1951), founded by Pierre Schaeffer under the auspices of Radiodiffusion-Télévision Français (RTF); the Centro sperimentale elettroacustico in Gravesano (1954); the RAI Studio of Phonology in Milan (1955); the Polish Radio Experimental Studio led by Jozef Patkowski and designed by Polish architect and Team Ten member, Oskar Hansen, in Warsaw (1957); the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in London (1958); the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York (1959); and the Siemens Studio für Elektronische Musik in Munich (1959).

Of this roll-call of institutions, it was the Centro sperimentale elettroacustico in Gravesano that served as most influential prototype for the Berlin laboratory. Supported financially by UNESCO, the studio in Gravesano became both an intellectual and experimental hub, developing further Hermann Scherchen’s early interest in electroacoustics as it related to sound and space. After fleeing Nazi Germany, Scherchen not only led the studio but also oversaw the Gravesaner Blätter, a journal that published works and articles addressing the Grenzprobleme (border problems) between music, space, and electroacoustics. The journal brought together a disparate cast of artists, scientists, and intellectuals, among them Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, Theodor W. Adorno, Lothar Cremer, Hans-Joachim von Braunmühl, and Pierre Schaeffer. It was this very idea of Grenzprobleme that inspired the name of the studio in East Berlin, tracing an arc of influences between the Weimar period and postwar Berlin. However, in the Cold War context, the entangled relationships among radio, electroacoustics, and space became a complex and trans-scalar territorial and political problem, while also becoming, especially in Berlin, an archetypal border problem (Grenzprobleme) as well.

AVM-31 0801.1 and AVM-31 0801.2

This piece is part of the program Die Musikwerkstatt and was transmitted on the 6^th of November 1964 by the GDR’s radio station Radio DDR 2. The program contains a dialogue between Dieter Boeck and Gerhard Steinke, the latter being the director of the Labor für Akustisch-Musikalische Grenzprobleme and sound engineer inside the Funkhaus in Nalepastraße, the central broadcasting house of the GDR. In this episode, Steinke discusses the entangled influences between technique and art, providing precise recorded examples of the acoustic characteristics of the Funkhaus in Nalepastraße. It is one of the best examples in which the sonic-spatial characteristics of a building are explained and transmitted to a broader audience, making evident the relevance of the pedagogical aspect and the political ambition behind the sonic project broadcast by the GDR.

AVM-31 0797.1, AVM-31 0797.2, and AVM-31 0797.3

This piece is part of the program Die Musikwerkstatt and was transmitted on the 7^th of September 1967 by the GDR’s radio station Radio DDR 2. The program contains a dialogue between Dieter Boeck and Gerhard Steinke, the latter being the director of the Labor für Akustisch-Musikalische Grenzprobleme and sound engineer inside the Funkhaus in Nalepastrasse, the central broadcasting house of the GDR. The episode is contained in three different tapes. Part 1 begins with a discussion about the difference in terminology between “electronic music” (elektronische Musik) and “electronic sound art” (elektronische Klangkunst). One senses the political tension underlying the idea of electronic instruments influencing the concept of music. This part presents, among other things, music for film created with electronic instruments by Hans Hendrik Wedding in the GDR’s electroacoustic laboratory. Part 2 presents the piece Orient-Occident by Iannis Xenakis, recorded in the studio in Paris, another by Karlheinz Stockhausen recorded in Cologne, and vocoder experiments developed in the Siemens Studio in Munich. These examples are followed by Luigi Nono’s Fabrica Illuminata, another piece developed in the studio in Toronto, and music produced with computers in the studio in Stockholm. All the pieces proudly highlight that, by that year, the GDR could make stereo transmissions to their listeners. Part 3 is focused on experiments done in the studio in the GDR, including Studie für Elektronische Klänge und eine Altstimme by Bernd Wefelmeyer.

AVM-31 0824

This tape contains the electronic piece titled Zoologischer Garten, composed by American composer Frederick Rzewski in the Labor für Akustisch-Musikalische Grenzprobleme between August and December 1965. In 1965, Rzewski was a fellow of the Ford Foundation in West Berlin, and due to his socialist political inclinations, he accepted Gerhard Steinke’s invitation to collaborate with the GDR’s laboratory for electroacoustics. Rzewski’s 23-minute composition, created with the Subharchord (the GDR’s first electronic synthesizer), was recorded in the Labor für Akustisch-Musikalische Grenzprobleme and was meant to be transmitted via radio to East and West Germany, in what would have been the first electronic music concert broadcast by East German radio. Due to various political reasons, the transmission never took place, and the piece remained unpublished until today.

AVM-31 0823

This piece is part of the program Auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Klangkunst and was transmitted on the 24^th of August 1965 by the GDR’s radio station Deutschlandsender. This episode is part of a series dedicated to the history of electronic music in different countries. Following three other episodes monographically dedicated to the studios in Paris (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), Cologne (Studio für elektronische Musik), and Munich (Siemens Studio für Elektronische Musik), this program was dedicated to the developments of electronic music in socialist countries, with a particular focus on the experimental studio in Warsaw, Poland. After providing an overview of work developed in socialist countries, including studios in Prague, Bratislava, and Pilsen in the Czech Republic, some examples from the Soviet Union, and others from Hungary, the program focuses on the experiments done with tape in the studio in Poland. Steinke makes specific remarks about the “architectonic dimensions” of this studio, designed by architect and Team 10 member Oskar Hansen.

AVM-31 0838

This piece is part of the program Auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Klangkunst and was transmitted on the 19^th of October 1965 by the GDR’s radio station Deutschlandsender. The program is entirely dedicated to the history and experiments conducted at the Illinois Experimental Studio, founded by Lejaren Hiller in 1958. The discussion is between Gerhard Steinke and Gerhard Schwalbe, and it highlights the uniqueness of the computer-generated sounds by Hiller and his collaborators in this studio. The program makes specific references to the book Experimental Music (McGraw Hill, 1959), published by Hiller and Leonard Isaacson, and gives the listener insights into the exchanges and collaborations occurring between electronic music studios across the Cold War divide. Gerhard Steinke emphasizes that Hiller provided him with a mono copy of the sound pieces presented in the program, due to the impossibility of stereo radio transmission at that time.

AVM-31 0843

This piece is part of the program Auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Klangkunst and was transmitted on the 3^rd of March 1966 by the GDR’s radio station Deutschlandsender. The discussion is between Gerhard Steinke and Gerhard Schwalbe. This episode is dedicated to Studio Gravesano, founded in Switzerland in 1954 by Hermann Scherchen with the support of UNESCO. The program focuses primarily on the specific techniques developed by Hermann Scherchen in the studio, techniques deeply influenced by his past as a radio composer, having started his career in the Haus des Rundfunks designed by Hans Poelzig in the 1930s. The program portrays an interesting correlation between the mechanical space of radio recording and the space of electroacoustic technologies explored by Scherchen.

AVM-31 0844

This piece is part of the program Auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Klangkunst and was transmitted on the 5^th of April 1966 by the GDR’s radio station Deutschlandsender. The discussion is between Gerhard Steinke and Gerhard Schwalbe. This episode is dedicated to the figure of Luigi Nono and his visit to the studio in Adlershof, Berlin. Steinke remarks about Nono using the Subharchord and their facilities, but he states that the program will be based on tapes Nono left in the studio. The program also emphasizes Luigi Nono’s affiliation with the communist party and how he sought to expand socialism and political critique through his music. The program portrays the fluent exchange between the RAI Studio in Milan and the electronic music studio in the GDR.

AVM-31 0845

This piece is part of the program Auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Klangkunst and was transmitted on the 28^th of April 1966 by the GDR’s radio station Deutschlandsender. The discussion is between Gerhard Steinke and Gerhard Schwalbe, and it is the 16th and last episode of this program. The program gives an overview of the topics discussed across the 16 episodes, presenting the studios of electronic music production as a transnational collaborative scene across the divide. In the first tape, Gerhard Steinke presents the piece Moments Musicaux by Joachim Thurm and, among other things, discusses the problem of how to translate electronic music sounds into the symbolic order of music notation. The symphonic orchestra was recorded inside Saal I of the Funkhaus in Nalepastrasse in 1965 and is placed in dialogue with the electronic sounds coming from the Subharchord. Later, the piece Galilei by Siegfried Matthus is introduced. Siegfried Matthus himself is invited to present the piece, and he speaks about his role as a composer within broader structures in the GDR, including his collaboration on the piece Manifest, based on texts by Bertolt Brecht. Matthus discusses how he used the Subharchord both as a new sound generator and as a modifier and enhancer of the human voice. Based on Bertolt Brecht’s texts, the piece is one of the most challenging tensions between abstraction and realism expressed in any compositions done in the context of this experimental studio. Unfortunately, the piece is not included in this tape.