Etude, Nr. 1/5

In January 1952 Stockhausen travelled to Paris to study with Olivier Messiaen, and by March had become familiar with composers such as Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, and Michel Philippot who were working with musique concrète at Pierre Schaeffer's Club d’Essai. Beginning in November, Stockhausen was able to work in the studio, but only recording and cataloguing natural sounds, mainly of percussion instruments. In December, at last, Stockhausen was allowed to make his own piece. Using sounds recorded from a prepared piano, he cut the tape into short pieces, spliced the pieces together, and superimposed the results (Toop 1976, 295–96). This involved taking the attack segment of each sound and repeating it to produce a relatively constant sound (Toop 1979, 387). The result was then transposed using a transposition machine called a phonogène (Stockhausen 1992, 5, 95). The entire process was accomplished in twelve days, concluded on 15 December 1952 (Blumröder 1993, 92). It was the first piece by a non-French composer made in the Paris studio (Frisius 2008, 61). Even before completing the piece, Stockhausen was becoming disillusioned with musique concrète (Toop 1979, 388), and in a letter to Henri Pousseur written only a few months later, Stockhausen described the Etude as a "negative result" (Toop 1976, 297).