Portrait Enno Poppe

Back to the future: in Enno Poppe’s Rundfunk, the sounds of Hammond organ, Minimoog, and Yamaha DX-7 celebrate a happy reign. For Poppe takes us back to the sixties and seventies, when the studios of the state broadcasting stations were a paradise for sonic tinkerers who invented electronic music here: “Without radio, new music would not exist in its present form,” this year’s Lucerne composer-in-residence asserts. But because nothing ages faster than technology, these once-so-innovative sound worlds have long since burned out and are hardly available today. Poppe reproduces them using nine synthesizers, but without having in mind a mere backward-looking homage. Rather, he is concerned with unused potential: there are “so many wonderful old pieces and old synthesizers with great sounds,” yet “people often only scratched the surface and then didn’t continue working on them, but hurried on to invent new instruments. I think the sounds alone can add up to a lot more than what was done with them back then.”