Brigitte Angerhausen is a classically trained pianist, composer, producer, and award-winning audio engineer based in Köln (Cologne), Germany. Her career has included film sound, live recording, and collaboration with an international roster of clients. Here she talks with Lisa Machac (of Omni Sound Project) about her work, plans for the future, and a love of Bach.
You've been involved in music for a long time. How did you get started?
I started in music at the age of four, because my parents sent me to a music preschool. Apparently, I loved it. I hit that hard, playing on the glockenspiel and having a connection between the color of the note and the sound of the glockenspiel. I was really into this as a kid. They said, "Well, do you want to play an instrument?" I said, "Yes, I would love to play the piano." So, I had classical piano lessons, starting at the age of five. I had a marvelous piano teacher. She was from Japan, and she left Japan because she wanted to teach music in a loving way for music, and for the children who are learning it. We stayed together until I was finished with school. We stuck together for a long time; even through the hard times of puberty. She was loyal and a very good teacher. When I was older, coming to the end of school, the question arose of, "Where am I going to go?" I would have loved to study music, and piano also, but not classical.
Luckily, I had a friend of my parents telling me, "Well, you could sit on the other side of the window and learn how to be a recording engineer. Wouldn't that be interesting?" I had a big chance to go to national radio [Westdeutscher Rundfunk] here in Köln and visit a big recording studio there. I was fascinated by all of the big buttons and the red recording light. I thought this was magic. That's why I decided to study sound engineering. I had close relatives in Chicago, [Illinois]; they had invited me and said I could come whenever I wanted. I went to the U.S. At the same time, another friend gave me the August edition of Mix Magazine. In that edition they had lists of all the education places in the United States, so I picked out a couple of them. I checked out schools in Chicago, Washington, and New York.
We were just talking about being that last generation that went to college by looking at a catalog.
It was exactly that. It was a humongous list of places, and to me they all sounded interesting. Since I was close to Chicago, I had a chance to meet the representative of the recording department (at that time) at Columbia College Chicago on Michigan Avenue. The way they explained to me how they handled the teaching and the classes – how all of that is organized – sounded appealing to me. It was a lot of practice, a lot of hands-on. All the teachers were active experts in their respective fields. The guy who was teaching acoustics was doing acoustic building of professional recording studios. I loved my studies in the U.S. Then I went to work in Düsseldorf, [Germany], and I had a hard time – after the high energy of working and living in Chicago – to go back to having a controlled 9-to-5 job doing audio for film.
What was that like? Was it just that you had been a student with all this free rein, and then you had more focus?
It was not a matter of free rein. It was a matter of energy. I thought it was a little boring.
You've said that you didn't intend to do film. How did you get into that specific area?
At Columbia College, since it's a college of liberal arts, I hung out with a lot of film students while I was studying. That's why I had, at first, an inclination into doing music for film recording. I applied for a job at an audio film studio. I had a hard time, not only with the place I was working, but with Germany altogether. The way of life here to me appeared, at that time, very small and closed-in. By chance, I went to Madrid [Spain]. I found myself...
