throughout generations before recording and formal notation. Simple melodies have been around for thousands of years. The average person knows hundreds of them. It’s just how we tick. This ability is one of the most important parts of music. I also don’t think it matters how you hear the melodies, be it recorded or by a musician on the street. It’s scientifically proven. You just put three or four definite notes together and we can remember them. Melodies are infinite.
on the highway in the Ruhr region?
Yes, of course. But Autobahn was a hit record more because it combined some very essential ideas: a catchy tune with brilliant lyrics, and the idea that music doesn’t just come from traditional instruments—woodwinds, strings, piano—but also from the sounds of nature and machinery. You can compose with wind, water or the sound of machines and in doing so, you’re able to articulate time in very distinct ways. Autobahn is the sound of nature, technology and ambience; objects, people, human and synthetic voice, things passing by an open window and so much more. Of course, Kraftwerk weren’t the first to do this—it is derived from early twentiethcentury futurism, later the musique concrète experiments by Pierre Schaeffer in Paris and Karlheinz Stockhausen at WDR’s Studio für elektronische Musik Köln. But also in pop music. Listen to “Summer in the City” from 1966 by The Lovin’ Spoonful. It starts with a little piece of musique concrète. Or “Born to be Wild”, on the other end of the motor revving spectrum. Compared to “Autobahn”, that is.
Well, they used a VW Beetle, not a Harley. Your new album Off the Record was created from sketches recorded in your musical diary between 1977 and 1993. Would Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider and Wolfgang Flür recognize any of it? Had you played these sketches for anybody?
Musically and thematically, Off the Record seems to have its roots in Kraftwerk, although there’s almost a meta-quality in how it’s presented. For example, “Atomium” isn’t about atomic energy per se, but rather its artistic representation in the form of the famous atomshaped building in Brussels. “Nachtfahrt” also sounds as much like a study on how to write a song about driving and transportation as it is a song about driving. Would you at all call the album a kind of interpretation of both Kraftwerk and Kraftwerkian tropes?
While founding members Ralf Hütter (center left) and Florian Schneider (center right) are often credited as the true masterminds behind Kraftwerk, Bartos (front left) boasts songwriting credits on every single track off both The Man-Machine (1978) and Computer World (1981)—two of the band’s most critically acclaimed albums. Before joining Kraftwerk in 1975, Bartos had studied to become a classical percussionist and earned his keep playing in symphony orchestras and at opera houses in and around Germany’s Ruhr region.
Maybe, I don’t know. It was a secret diary— my own place, so to speak. I never actually intended on creating a diary per se—this was just daily work. At the time, I had been playing a lot at the opera, which is how I made my living. I would go into the music library in Dusseldorf, which is a small city . . . and at the time, a good one. I would take home scores of Puccini, Wagner, Debussy and Stravinsky, put them on my piano and study what they were doing compositionally. I would dig into Manon Lescaut and try to improvise over it, because that’s what you do when you’re a composer: you lift from other people, and your subconscious is in constant mash-up mode: First you desire something, then you copy it, then you make mashups of your copies and end up with something close to the original. But it’s not the original. And from that point creativity starts, that’s when you get your own artistic handwriting. But, you know, it always starts with copying. So some of the songs on the album come from ideas that were preKraftwerk?
Yes. During my studies I was taking classes on counterpoint and I always loved analyzing Mozart and Bach. I was learning how to compose a symphony, starting with theme A and then theme B and so on. When I entered the band, we took advantage of our knowledge of music’s architecture. I think the human brain is built to remember melodies and specific pitches. This is how we transported melodies 56 EB 1/2013
[laughing loudly] Yeah, it’s true, it’s true. I’m a big fan of holistic concepts. After being a professor for five years at the University of Arts in Berlin, I was constantly explaining to my students what to do and how to do it. So I thought it would be great for them to create a film with a soundtrack and write about the actual process of creating at the same time. Each media and each art form has a different center and informs the other. This is what it means to work in an interdisciplinary fashion. It’s great for students to write about what they’re intending to do, kind of a diary. And not just on a theoretical level. It can be incredibly insightful to know how a work evolves.
What else did you take away from teaching?
Well, I actually taught before when I was at university taking my examinations for various instruments and music theory—piano, drums, etc. But when you’re teaching an instrument, everything’s clear. It’s all been done before for a very long time. You just follow the path. But the University of Arts in Berlin asked me to define my own curriculum, which is quite different. I definitely didn’t want to lecture on pop or Kraftwerk, but rather the conversion of image and sound, and analyzing the rhythms of both. In previous interviews, you’ve described your interest in converting the non-narrative qualities of music to film. You’ve also described music as “all form and no content” in its emotive thrust. You don’t think there’s such a thing as musical narrative?
I do, but it’s very different than what we conventionally understand as “narrative”. Because everybody listens to sound in a different way and gets a different meaning out of it. And that’s good. It’s why I was so keen on working with film and music at the same time. It gives you more opportunities to shape the message and to reach the recipient. The convergence of image and sound, that’s what I’m up to. And the history of that audio-visual “wedding” is really exciting. In the