The composer and festival organizer Josef Anton Riedl, who died this March, was artistic director of the Siemens studio for electronic music in Munich from 1959 until 1966, when the studio was disbanded. Here sound compositions for theatre, radio, film and television were produced in addition to independent musical works by such artists as John Cage, Mauricio Kagel and Henri Pousseur. Riedl’s own works in the field of concrete and electronic music had their roots in the commercial music that he produced. He arranged sections of and discarded fragments from commissioned music, turning them into independent pieces, for example the Studien für elektronische Klänge [Studies for Electronic Music], which Riedl released in 1972 as part of the Studio Reihe Neuer Musik series of the WERGO record label.
