Studie I

Studie I (English: Study I) is an electronic music composition by from the year 1953. It lasts 9 minutes 42 seconds and, together with his Studie II, comprises his work number ("opus") 3.

The composition was created in the Cologne Studio for Electronic Musik of the NWDR between July and November 1953 (Decroupet and Ungeheuer 1994, 112). In the final stages of editing, Stockhausen commemorated the birth of his first daughter, Suja, on 25 September 1953 by inserting a "serially unauthorized" 108 Hz (in a phrase attributed to Richard Toop), "'one-gun salute'" (Maconie 2005, 131). The world premiere took place in Cologne on 19 October 1954 in the concert series Musik der Zeit, together with Stockhausen’s Studie II and works by Henri Pousseur, Karel Goeyvaerts, Herbert Eimert, and Paul Gredinger () (Morawska-Büngeler 1988, 115).

The work was important amongst other reasons because it was made (as were the works by Pousseur, Goeyvaerts, and Gredinger) not with the use of (electronic) instruments, like the Trautonium or Melochord, but rather out of pure sine tones. For the first time, complete compositional control was achieved, even over timbre. The ideal was to produce each sound synthetically and thus separately determined in its details: "The conscious organization of music extends to the micro-acoustic sphere of the sound material itself" (, 22–23; , 101). It is serially organized on all musical levels (, 22–24; , 101–102).

Unlike Studie II, the score has never been published, apart from the first page as an illustration to Stockhausen's analysis of the piece (, 34–35; , 116–17).

The fundamental hypothesis for Studie I was that its serial system should begin in the middle of the human auditory range and extend in both directions to the limits of pitch perception. Durations and amplitudes are inversely proportional to the distance from this central reference, so the sounds become both shorter and softer as they approach the upper and lower limits of pitch audibility (, 102).

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