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Paul Hindemith: Des kleinen Elektromusikers Lieblinge for three Trautoniums, No. 6: “Lebhaft, mit Kadenzen” (1930)

From the album Elektronische Impressionen (1998)

In 1930, a new electric instrument was unveiled: named after its inventor, the engineer Friedrich Trautwein, the Trautonium was a monophonic instrument in which the touch of the player’s finger pressed a wire against an underlying metal strip, closing the circuit and generating a tone. Following musical convention, the frequency of the generated tone increased as the player’s finger moved from left to right. Like many other first-wave electric instruments, the Trautonium allowed a continuous glissando between tones, but to enable more precise staccato playing, Trautwein affixed a number of leather “tongues” above the metal strip, which could be positioned to mark the pitches of a scale. Thus the instrument could be played either directly on the metal band, or through the configurable keys.

To show off the new instrument, the German composer Paul Hindemith, at that time among the most famous figures in European music, wrote a set of seven short pieces for three Trautoniums. Hindemith’s composition was called Des kleinen Elektromusikers Lieblinge (The Little Electro-musician’s Favorites), and was premiered at the New Music Berlin festival in 1930. The character of the pieces is typical of Hindemith’s 1920s compositional style: sprightly, contrapuntal, and tonal, yet suffused with pungent dissonances. The structure of this piece, the sixth in the set, is a simple ternary form (ABA) followed by a brief cadenza for each of the instruments and a coda. The resulting mix of futuristic, otherworldly sounds and neoclassical formal molds is uniquely characteristic of the early 20th-century phenomenon known as “electric music.”

In 1933, the radio company Telefunken began mass-producing a simplified model of the instrument called the Volkstrautonium, but like virtually all the electric instruments of the period, this device was doomed to failure by a combination of socio-economic turmoil and a resilient culture of musical technophobia. In spite of its flop as a consumer instrument, the Trautonium enjoyed a substantial afterlife, primarily through the single-handed advocacy of the instrument’s sole virtuoso, Oskar Sala. Around 1950, Sala began developing a new, expanded form of the instrument he called a Mixturtrautonium, which featured a number of improvements, including the ability to generate subharmonic frequencies below the primary tone. Sala’s instrument was used in a number of film soundtracks of the time, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). 

(This photograph shows a later, three-voice version of the Trautonium, developed in the mid-1930s. Notice the three terraced manuals, consisting of flat strips of metal overlaid with “tongues” corresponding roughly to the keys of a piano. The extensions on either side of the manuals contain the tone-generating circuitry and feature dials to adjust the timbre. The pedals are for volume and additional timbre control.)

May 31, 2011, 2:57pm