Studie II

Studie II (English: Study II) is an electronic music composition by from the year 1954 and, together with his Studie I, comprises his work number ("opus") 3. It is serially organized on all musical levels and was the first published score of electronic music.

The composition was provisionally titled Bewegungen (Motions), but the name was later changed to Studie II (, 44). It was commissioned by what was then the NWDR, in whose Studio für elektronische Musik in Cologne the piece was created. The world premiere took place in Cologne on 19 October 1954 in the concert series Musik der Zeit, together with Stockhausen’s Studie I and works by Henri Pousseur, Karel Goeyvaerts, Herbert Eimert, and Paul Gredinger () (Morawska-Büngeler 1988, 115).

In contradistinction to musique concrète, Stockhausen wanted no longer "to use any electronic acoustic sources, with the sound spectra already built up (Melochord, Trautonium), but only produced from the pure tones of a frequency generator ("pure" notes without overtones)" (, 23), therefore using neither electroacoustic instruments nor other found sounds. 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).

He had previously tried out sound synthesis with pure tones in Studie I. However, an aesthetic problem arose: "Instead of a fusion of the pure tones into new, more complex sounds, the individual pure tone components appeared separately audible and are easily identifiable. Thus, the impression develops of chords formed from pures tone instead of a new sound quality. On the other hand, the individual pure tones receive their own sound quality owing to their easy identifiability, about comparable to the specific sound of a simple music instrument somewhere between a flute and special pipe-organ registers" (Lack 2002).

Stockhausen's two Elektronische Studien are amongst the earliest examples of composition with what he called "groups", in contrast to the earlier concept of punctualism or "point composition", in works like Kreuzspiel (Toop 2005, 3).

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