Kees Tazelaar is a Dutch composer and historian. He has been the head of the Institute of Sonology located in The Hague since 2006. In this interview, he talks about the past and present of the Institute, early Dutch electronic music and what makes Sonology unique as an educational institution.
As far as I understand it, the Institute of Sonology evolved out of the Phillips STEM studio for electronic music from the 60s. Can you say something about those early origins?
Kees Tazelaar: STEM stands for “Studio voor Elektronische Muziek [studio for electronic music]”. Funnily enough, stem also means “voice” in Dutch. This name came about when the studio moved from the Phillips Research Laboratories to Utrecht University in November 1960. In those early years, it was basically just a single studio with a workshop facility and a listening room. So it initially started out very small, but it gradually grew.
In 1964, Gottfried Michael Koenig became the artistic director of STEM. He then began to further expand the studio. This also led to a search for a name closer to the studio’s primary tasks of research, education and production. It was officially renamed as Institute of Sonology in October 1967, which was also when the Institute’s one-year course first started.
Can you say a bit more about Gottfried Michael Koenig? Was he German or Dutch? I know he was at the Studio WDR before, how did that transition from the Studio WDR to the Institute happen?
He was German. He came to the Netherlands for the first time for the Gaudeamus Music Week to supervise a composer’s workshop, where he also gave lectures. Then, in 1962 he started a course for electronic music at Gaudeamus in the city of Bilthoven, which is close to Utrecht. It happened in a very small studio in a garden house. So he would come to the Netherlands for one week a month to teach, and the students would work on their assignments the rest of the month. This happened under the supervision of Jaap Vink, who was already there as the main technician at the time.
His course was very popular and was repeated the next year. At the same time, there was also an internal organizational crisis at the STEM. So in June 1964, it was decided that Koenig would take over the studio. He became the artistic director of STEM in September 1964 and permanently moved to the Netherlands with his family. Koenig was also happy to leave Cologne because his collaborations with Karlheinz Stockhausen had become very problematic.
What was the relationship between Koenig and Stockhausen like, what were their musical differences?
I’ve written on all of this extensively in my book On the Threshold of Beauty. The physical book is sold out but can download a free PDF from the TU Berlin here.
But to give you a rough idea, the collaboration between Koenig and Stockhausen was very successful in the beginning — they made “Kontakte” and “Gesang der Jünglinge” together! But when Stockhausen took over the leadership of the studio WDR from Herbert Eimert in 1962, he started to become quite … bossy (laughs). Of course, Stockhausen was always bossy, but as the studio’s director he now had full control over everything that was happening. And as the new director, he received an enormous budget to renovate and expand the studio.
The thing is, Koenig at the time really wanted to start working with a computer. He was hoping that the studio’s expanded budget was going to be used for a computer. But Stockhausen didn’t want that, he just wanted to increase the number of existing equipment — to have more oscillators, filters, tape machines and so on. But he didn’t really have a vision of what kind of future developments there could be for this studio. Koenig was very disappointed about this. Of course, he had his own plans on what should be done, but there was no way implement them with Stockhausen as the director.
So when Koenig had that successful course in the Netherlands, he started to think that there might be better opportunities in the Netherlands for him to do what he wanted to do. And that came to be the case when he was offered the directorship of STEM, which at that time was still very closely related to the Phillips corporation. Koenig proposed his ideas for a computer to Phillips, and they gave him access to a computer at the mathematics department of the university of Utrecht, which he used to develop his Project 1 computer composition project. He also started to think about the possibilities of using digital to analog (DAC) converters to describe sound at the sample level and what kind of new compositional strategies could emerge around that.
When was this?
That was around 1964 to 1966.
That’s very early to be working with computers!
That’s one of the reasons why Koenig is a pioneer! In 1970, Sonology even bought its own large computer, a PDP-15. That’s the difference between Koenig when he was in Cologne and when he was at Sonology: In Cologne, he was always working for other people but at the Institute, he was able to develop what he really wanted to do.
What was the role of the Phillips corporation in early Dutch electronic music?
In a way it was important, yes. There was the electronic music studio at the Phillips Research Laboratories and the Phillips Pavilion at the 1958 world exhibition — which, by the way, were not related, but entirely separate projects. But from the point of view of a company like Phillips, these things were basically accidents. They weren’t a part of the company’s regular policy.
What happened was that there was an acoustics department at Phillips that was led by Roelof Vermeulen, who was also a musician and was involved in an organization for promoting electronic music in the Netherlands. In 1956, he made it possible to open one room in the acoustics department at the Phillips Research Laboratories to allow the composer Henk Badings to compose a piece. That piece was quite successful, and so it continued and Dick Raaijmakers also ended up making a lot of music there. But Phillips didn’t take the whole thing very seriously. it was allowed to happen, but it wasn’t considered important.
The Phillips Pavilion was planned as a demonstration of Phillips equipment. Varése only became involved to compose the music for it because Phillips had asked Le Corbusier to design the building. So again, it happened, but it wasn’t that Phillips had some kind of vision to use electronic music for artistic purposes or anything like that.
How did the institutional transition from the Philips studio to the Institute of Sonology happen?
Roelof Vermeulen retired in 1959 and it was decided the Philips studio as it existed then was going to be closed. But there were plans to let it continue somewhere else. And that place became the university of Utrecht. In Utrecht, it first started as just a studio for production without an educational program. But gradually, the course that Koenig did in Bilthoven became integrated with the studio, and it became an Institute that encompassed both the productions studios and the educational courses.
Do you know who came up with the term Sonology?
I found a text from 1965 where Koenig is talking about a “laboratory for Sonology”, so it must have been his invention. According to an article I found in the 1967 RUU science bulletin, the term is derived from a combination of the words sonare and logos.
Do you have any associations with the term? What do you usually answer if someone asks you what it means?
For me, it’s just the name of an institute. There are people who think Sonology is a style or a genre, which I find it a bit strange! But when I’m asked, I often say, well, one of the reasons why I’m still here is that we are still trying to find out what it means! (laughs)
Can you say something about the custom-built equipment at the Institute’s historical Voltage Control Studio? You have some videos about it on your YouTube Channel and they are really fascinating!
If you look at the very early electronic music studios, including the one at Phillips, they were using technical measurement equipment that wasn’t made for musical purposes. The idea to take things further and to start automating musical parameters with voltage control mainly came from Koenig. And at that time, voltage-controlled equipment for electronic music wasn’t on the market yet, so you had to design and build it yourself! At Sonology, this was done in the context of electronic music composition at this one specific institute. So it was a unique, tailor-made approach to designing equipment.
That is also why the naming conventions of this custom equipment are different to what later became standard. So for example, what’s called a VCO on a standard synthesizer today, we at the Institute call a “voltage-controlled function generator”. We could have of course adapted the more standard terminology by now but keeping it the way we’ve been doing it for so many decades also keeps this unique history alive. And we still design and build new devices in-house to this day! We have an electronics workshops and technicians who are very interested in listening to the ideas of our composers and to design and build new custom devices, also making use of new digital technology.
Was Sonology the first to put into practice the idea of voltage control?
I don’t know for sure. People are often coming up with things simultaneously in different places. But Sonology was one of the first, for sure. In terms of voltage control, if you look at what the studio in Utrecht had in 1966, it’s very impressive! They had the variable function generator that Koenig used to compose his Funktionen. It was a 50-step sequencer that could be used to control other devices and also run at audio rate to be used as a waveshaper and so on.
On your YouTube Channel, there are some interesting videos on the complex feedback patches that Jaap Vink used to make his music at the Institute. Can you say something about how and why he arrived at this approach?
Unfortunately Jaap Vink died recently, so I cannot ask him anymore! But I was a student in his classes starting from 1981. These were just things he was doing all the time. He was not a composer in the traditional sense that he would have some kind of prepared idea of what he wanted to do and then execute it. He wanted to set up circuitry and patches and really interact with them. That was an approach he found early on and worked with continually. Jaap Vink was also crucial in the realization of Roland Kayn’s music. This whole idea of cybernetics in music that Kayn was talking about is coming out of Jaap Vink’s interactive feedback patches. When I hear the music of Roland Kayn made in Utrecht, I just hear Jaap Vink!
That seems very similar to the approach that Serge Tcherepnin had when building the Serge modular. He was designing musical concepts based on the behavior of circuits, instead of the other way around.
Yeah!
Who else was at the Institute in the post-war period?
There were not only composers, but also people from other disciplines at the institute. For example, there was Stan Tempelaars, who was basically a physicist. He also played the piano, but his job was really to talk about things like systems and signals. There was Greta Vermeulen (also known as Greta Monach), who was also using computers for poetry. Werner Kaegi came from Switzerland and developed VOSIM together with Tempelaars and the technician Jo Scherpenisse. Barry Truax did the first real-time FM synthesis at Sonology. And then there were also many others that came for the one-year course, some of which stayed, like Paul Berg who ended up teaching at the institute.
It seems like the Institute was very interdisciplinary.
I think that’s still something that characterizes the institute now. The people who teach here are of course all interested in music and composition, but not all of them are composers. We have someone with a background in architecture, a computer scientist, and someone with a background in visual and sound art. It’s very diverse and you also see that in the large variety of projects that are done here at the institute.
Is there a guiding principle or concept that brings all of these things together? Is it the concept of sound?
Sound is what connects everything. But also, just sound in itself means nothing to me. Of course, just having a great sound can be nice, but that’s not enough! It needs to be placed in a musical or artistic context, and that context should be interesting! I mean, what is a sine wave? It’s really a very boring sound — that is, until you place it in a context where it becomes a tool or element for composition. I think the important thing here is that we don’t deal with stylistic dogmas. We are open to everything, as long as it is taken seriously and properly questioned.
Of course, just having a great sound can be nice, but that’s not enough! It needs to be placed in a musical or artistic context, and that context should be interesting!
What kind of students usually apply to study at the Institute?
What I find important here is that traditionally, you have to first study traditional composition and then maybe, much later, at some point you can do something with electronics. And I think that’s a very old-fashioned approach. Because there are generations of young people that are very familiar with technology, it’s their way of looking at the world.
So we also let people in that don’t have those backgrounds in traditional music education. Of course, once they are in the course, they have to learn those things. Perhaps not to the level of somebody who studies traditional composition, but they have to be able to communicate with people from that environment.
But this openness to people from different backgrounds makes it a much freer environment. This is especially true for the one-year course, which has no academic requirements at all! The range of people in that course is enormous. For example, at the moment, we have a member of Pussy Riot and then somebody who plays for the Ensemble Modern!
So you could say that the Institute is bringing together both the academic and the popular side of things?
Firstly, I don’t really believe in a separation between the academic and the popular. I mean, it’s common now for people who do techno to say they are inspired by Pierre Schaeffer or Stockhausen. But when you look closer, what does it actually mean to reference that past? At Sonology, we have the advantage of having a very strong historical awareness. We can point to the roots and help people build a relationship to the past, in order to feel freer in the present. I think that’s important, because there’s always these very superficial ways of looking at the past of electronic music that can be hindering.
For example, saying that musique concrète is just sounds recorded with a microphone and that electronic music [elektronische Musik from the Studio WDR] is just music made with sine waves. But Schaeffer developed synthesizers in the 70s! He never talked about “concrete sound”. It was Stockhausen who started talking about “konkrete Klänge”, but he didn’t know what he was talking about! (laughs) For Schaeffer, “concrete” just meant directly operating with the sound material - but that material could also be electronic! The thing is that he didn’t want to rely on traditional symbolic notation, so concrete was meant in opposition to symbolic.
On the other hand, elektronische Musik in Germany was an attempt to compose the “sound itself” with sine waves in accordance with serial methods. That was very different to what Schaeffer was doing. But then, at the early Darmstädter Ferienkurse there was also a lot of musique concrète presented, so everyone was interested in what everybody else was doing!
Do you have some examples of current projects at the Institute that bring together both the past and the present of electronic music?
If you think about wavefield synthesis — we have a whole studio dedicated to it — it’s very modern, cutting-edge technology. But then the larger topic of spatial sound, of how to place sound in an acoustic space, is itself very old. You can relate that to historical developments going all the way back. I think that’s what education is all about and that’s why students come here. To find an environment where this tradition is alive. Across the courses, we have about 70 students from all over the world right now, which is a fantastic thing.
What do you think makes Sonology special as an educational institution?
A certain open-mindedness, I think. It’s not a very “academic” approach. We also have a very healthy gender balance right now, which is unusual for electronic music! There’s also a big variety of both cultural and musical backgrounds in our students. We also collaborate with other departments at the Hague Conservatory, organizing different concerts and festivals. We think improvisation and performance are an important part of it all and we take them seriously.
Do you know how students usually find out about the Institute?
I guess the internet and social media play a big part, since most of our students are coming from abroad now. We had over 100 applications for only 20 slots for our one-year course last year. It’s getting a bit crazy! (laughs).
Lastly, could you say something about your personal history with the Institute? You said you first came there in 1981. What is it that has kept you there all these decades?
I first came to the Institute as a 19-year-old, just doing the one-year course. I really liked the environment, and I got along well with everyone, and I also started to make music there. Then, Sonology moved to The Hague, where I was coincidentally living at the time, so it also came to me in a way (laughs). I then studied composition at the conservatory from 1989 to 1993. When Jaap Vink retired, I was asked to replace him as a teacher and then, in 2006, I was asked to become the head of the institute.
I think one of the main reasons for why I’m still interested in it is that there’s really not a big separation between the students and the staff here. Of course there is a hierarchy, but there is really a strong shared ethos for doing something new among everyone at the Institute, and that still inspires me enormously.
And you are still actively researching the history of the Institute, right?
Yes, in fact I am currently writing a new research proposal! (laughs)
You can find out more about the Institute of Sonology over at their website Sonology.org. You can also find out more about Kees and his work over at his personal website keestazelaar.com.