From Ton­meister to Ton­meister gradu­ate

The pro­fes­sion or the pro­fes­sion­al title of Ton­meister is re­l­at­ively young and came in­to be­ing with the de­vel­op­ment of ra­dio and sound film at the end of the twen­ties of the pre­vi­ous cen­tury. In 1949 Erich Thi­en­haus (see "His­tory of the In­sti­tu­te") foun­ded the first Ger­man mu­sic­al-acous­tic in­sti­tu­te for the train­ing of Ton­meisters - the course of study was thus "in­ven­ted".

Two years later, Georg Knepler, found­ing rect­or of the Ger­man Academy of Mu­sic Ber­lin (after 1964 the Academy of Mu­sic "Hanns Eisler"), to­geth­er with Siegfried Mit­lach­er, then head Ton­meister of Ber­lin Ra­dio (Ber­liner Rund­funk), de­ve­loped the train­ing of Ton­meister in East Ber­lin. The cur­riculum con­cluded with the pro­fes­sion­al title "Dip­lom-Ton­meister." From 1976 on­wards, Prof. Heinz Jäck­el, head Ton­meister of the ra­dio of the former GDR, dir­ec­ted the pro­gramme un­til it was dis­con­tin­ued in 1992 dur­ing re­uni­fic­a­tion. After re­uni­fic­a­tion of the two Ger­man states, the pro­fes­sion­al title "Dip­lom-Ton­meister" was com­pre­hens­ively re­cog­nised for all Ton­meisters of the former GDR.

Also at the Hoch­schule der Kün­ste in Ber­lin-West, a new course of stud­ies for Ton­meister was es­tab­lished in 1963, de­ve­loped on the mod­el of the Nord­west­deutsche Mu­sikakademie Det­mold (today Hoch­schule für Mu­sik). Here, un­der the dir­ec­tion of Prof. Hans-Lud­wig Feldgen, an already ex­ist­ing cur­riculum was ex­pan­ded, which had been es­tab­lished in the 1950s by Fritz Winck­el and Man­fred Krause at the Tech­nic­al Uni­versity of Ber­lin and sup­ple­men­ted by courses at the Hoch­schule der Kün­ste, today known as “Uni­versity of Arts”.

Back to Det­mold: Al­though the Ton­meister cur­riculum here was a full-fledged study pro­gram ori­en­ted to­wards uni­versity stand­ar­ds and also re­ceived in­ter­na­tion­al re­cog­ni­tion and at­ten­tion, it did not have a dip­loma de­gree ap­proved by the state of North Rhine-West­phalia un­til the 1980s. This was just reg­u­lated with­in the uni­versity. The reas­on for this was the fact that the state of North Rhine-West­phalia did not yet have a law gov­ern­ing art col­leges with­in which the in­di­vidu­al study pro­grams could op­er­ate. This changed in 1987 when the art col­lege law for the state of NRW was passed by the state par­lia­ment. It was only then that the uni­versity was able to con­ceive of a dip­loma study reg­u­la­tion for the study course “Mu­siküber­tra­gung” as well. After fre­quent sub­mis­sions from the Min­istry, in which a re­duc­tion of the gen­er­al num­ber of hours per week and of the cur­riculum length to eight semesters was called for, the ori­gin­ally con­ceived study reg­u­la­tions could fi­nally be passed - with only a few changes - so that the course of study "Mu­siküber­tra­gung" at the Hoch­schule für Mu­sik was of­fi­cially re­cog­nized on 13 Ju­ly 1998.

Through this pro­cess, a so-called post­gradu­ate dip­loma was also es­tab­lished: All former stu­dents of sound en­gin­eer­ing (Ton­meister stu­dents) who were en­rolled in the dip­loma course of stud­ies at the Det­mold Uni­versity of Mu­sic from Feb­ru­ary 9, 1981 un­til today and have passed their ex­ams can ap­ply for a sub­se­quent award of the dip­loma de­gree.

The trans­ition to the Bach­el­or / Mas­ter de­gree

After the path to Bach­el­or/Mas­ter de­grees had be­come in­ev­it­able (the so-called Bo­logna pro­cess), the re­main­ing courses of study in Ber­lin (West) and Det­mold were faced with the task of trans­fer­ring the ex­ist­ing con­tents of the Dip­lom course of study to a Bach­el­or/Mas­ter course of study.

Eight semesters for Bach­el­or's de­gree was the up­per lim­it per­mit­ted for the uni­versit­ies of mu­sic, and any­thing less did not seem to make sense in or­der to ac­quire the ne­ces­sary mu­sic­al and tech­nic­al skills. This was fol­lowed by a lengthy co­or­din­a­tion pro­cess, in which at­tempts were made to ac­com­mod­ate stu­dent per­form­ance and also the new pos­sib­il­it­ies for flex­ib­il­ity (e.g. elect­ives).

Det­mold was once again a pi­on­eer in this area, this time rather in­vol­un­tar­ily due to the uni­versity policy de­cisions in NRW. In the winter semester of 2008, the Dip­lom Ton­meister course was con­ver­ted to the Bach­el­or's/Mas­ter's sys­tem and the first stu­dents began study­ing ac­cord­ing to the Bach­el­or's de­gree reg­u­la­tions. These reg­u­la­tions have un­der­gone sev­er­al cor­rec­tions and have been val­id in their cur­rent form since the winter semester of 2013/14.

At the same time (2013/14), the Bach­el­or's pro­gram was com­pleted with a Mas­ter's de­gree in "Re­cord­ing Pro­du­cer” The changeover to the Bach­el­or/Mas­ter sys­tem was thus com­pleted for the time be­ing. Newly ad­ded were the Mas­ter's de­gree courses "Sound Dir­ec­tion (Klan­gre­gie)" and "Mu­sic Acous­tics". At the Uni­versity of Arts in Ber­lin, the changeover to the Bach­el­or/Mas­ter's de­gree pro­grams for sound en­gin­eers took place in 2013.