Ludwig Karl Koch

Ludwig Karl Koch MBE (13 November 1881, Frankfurt am Main - 4 May 1974, Harrow, London) was a broadcaster and sound recordist. An expert on recording animal sounds, he played a significant part in increasing the British public's appreciation of wildlife.

He was born into a music-loving Jewish family, and as a boy violinist, he was admitted to Clara Schumann's music circle. Later, he studied singing, and had a short but successful career as a concert singer. This was ended by the outbreak of World War I. As a child, he had been given an early phonograph and had recorded several animals.

Because he spoke fluent French, he joined military intelligence. After the armistice in 1918, he became chief delegate for repatriation for the French-occupied zone of Germany. He worked for the German government until 1925. In 1928, he was asked by the German subsidiary of Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) to start a cultural branch of the gramophone industry; this coincided with a revival of his childhood interest in animals. Thus from 1929, he began recording of animal sounds again using up-to-date equipment. He invented the sound-book: attaching gramophone records to an illustrated book.

Being a Jew, Koch's life under the Nazis became intolerable and in 1936 he fled to Britain. Sir Julian Huxley helped him to interest the ornithologist and publisher Harry Witherby in a sound-book of British wild birds. In 1936, Songs of Wild Birds was published, followed by two other sound-books by 1938.

Early in World War II, Huxley introduced Koch to the British Broadcasting Corporation, and his extraordinary, yet attractive and rather musical, Germanic voice accompanying his sound recordings soon became familiar to listeners. He retired in 1951, but continued to make expeditions to record wildlife sounds, visiting Iceland when he was seventy-one.

References

* Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
* L. Koch, Memoirs of a birdman (1955)
* J. Burton, ‘Master of nature's music: Ludwig Koch, 1881–1974’, Country Life, 157 (1975), 390–91
* J. F. Burton, ‘Our debt to Ludwig Koch: master of nature's music’, Recorded Sound, 74–5 (1979), 36–7
* "The Times" obituary, 7 May 1974