The early steps in electronic composition in The Netherlands were taken in the early nineteenfifties. The first electronic studio was the Phillips Physics Laboratory in Eindhoven where Dick Raaijmakers (1930), a piano teacher graduated at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, started to work at the department of radio and television sets (1954). Two years later he became an assistant at the acoustical department. At the end of 1960 a collaboration between the Phillips Lab and the University of Utrecht led to the creation of the first university Studio of Electronic Music, STEM. After leaving STEM in 1962 Raaijmakers and the electronic music composer Jan Boerman opened a private studio in The Hague. Finally, in 1966 a studio was created at the Royal Conservatory to permit students of composition to get acquainted with the electronic medium. This led to the founding of what has become one of the most important centers of electroacoustic music in Western Europe, the Institute of Sonology.

Michael Barker studied with both Raaijmakers and Boerman, in the period of 1982 to 1987, and became my teacher in 1994 and my mentor a year later when I asked for guidance in the development of an interactive recorder. He had already made several attempts in putting electronic devices on recorders. The one that called my attention was a contrabass square instrument made by Paetzold (Germany) that he modified in cooperation with STEIM (Studio for Electro Instrumental Music). The size of the instrument and its flat surfaces offered the possibilities for the installation of electronic components. Soon I acquired my own Paetzold contrabass and started to have ideas of my own with the guidance of Barker, who referred to these new developments as “extensions of the recorder in which any transformation should not destroy the possibilities of expression that the instrument offers”. In order to contribute to the “survival” of the instrument, its basic characteristics have to be kept alive. Questioning the role of the recorder in today’s music world, he said that “mutations and changes in plants and animals come as a consequence of an extreme pressure from the environment in which they are living” as an analogy to the life of musical instruments.

The idea of a contrabass recorder with an electronic system was born in 1986, when Michael Barker developed an instrument together with the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam. Due to the fast changes in technology, the instrument I have now is very different from the one Michael created. The instrument consists of a Paetzold contrabass recorder with 30 sensors installed on it.It uses a condenser microphone LCM 70 SD Systems placed in front of the window of the instrument.