Kurt Günther, Der Radionist (1927)

Max Radler, Radiohörer (1930)

June 18, 2011, 1:00am

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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

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Dziga Vertov: Soundtrack from Enthusiasm! Symphony of the Dombass (1931)

From the album Baku: Symphony of Sirens. Sound Experiments in the Russian Avant-Garde (2009)

Dziga Vertov (born Denis Kaufman, 1886-1954) was one of the most important figures of 20th-century cinema. Though overshadowed by his famous countryman Sergei Eisenstein, Vertov was the premier documentary filmmaker of young Soviet Russia. Based on the camera’s ability to report the truth of things in an entirely objective way—what Vertov called the “Kino-Eye”—he envisioned cinema as a vessel of knowledge about social reality directed at the sense of sight. But already in the years before the Revolution, Vertov also had an interest in the artistic potential of new sound technology as well, and around 1916 he began to experiment with phonograph recordings under the auspices of his so-called “Laboratory of Hearing.”

Vertov’s first sound film, Enthusiasm, in addition to being a visual tour de force, is one of the most remarkable musical experiments of the first half of the 20th century. For Enthusiasm, Vertov used the world’s first mobile recording station to carry out an “assault on sounds” in the coal mines of the Dombass region in the Ukraine. (“Mobile” is a relative term here, as the recording apparatus weighed about 2800 pounds.) After finishing the recording, Vertov worked for fifty days to edit the image and sound, which he reconfigured into an asynchronous, “contrapuntal” relationship in accordance with the theories expressed in the 1928 “Statement on Sound” written by Soviet directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov. Vertov called the resulting soundtrack a “symphony of noises.”

Enthusiasm is a document of the industrial fervor of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, comparable to such orchestral works as Alexander Mossolov’s Zavod or Julius Meytuss’ Dnieprostroi, a symphonic tribute to a newly constructed hydroelectric power station. However, the film met with the censure of the emerging conservative aesthetic of socialist realism, with Soviet critics denouncing it as a “concert of caterwauling.” Outside the Soviet Union, in the avant-garde film circles of Europe, the film was more favorably received. Charlie Chaplin said of it, “I would never have believed it possible to assemble mechanical noises to create such beauty. One of the most superb symphonies I have known. Dziga Vertov is a musician.” 

April 05, 2011, 11:04am

Radio News, July 1931

March 13, 2011, 1:29pm

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Jack Ellitt: “Journey #1” (excerpt)

From the album Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music, 1930-1973 (2008)

In the early 1930s, when most of Europe and the United States was still under the deep freeze of neoclassicism, the Australian composer Jack Ellitt created this flabbergasting piece of electronic music, one of the earliest of its kind. Consisting of a rapid barrage of sounds both recognizable and abstract (from birdsong and train whistles to unimaginably chaotic collocations of synthetic tones), “Journey #1” occupies an aesthetic position between the surrealistic audio-documentary of Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (composed just a few years earlier) and the schizoid sound-collage of John Cage’s first tape piece, the Williams Mix of 1952.

Ellitt was one of many musicians around the world experimenting around 1930 with the compositional possibilities of “drawn sound,” a process in which graphical inscriptions are photoelectrically converted into acoustic waves. According to the historian Hugh Davies, Ellitt first toyed with sound film around 1932, so it seems likely that it was the original medium for this piece, since magnetic tape would not be invented until 1935 and was not widely available until after WWII. This would also explain some of the more bizarre synthetic timbres in the piece, which could have been created by etching abstract shapes onto the film strip.

Another piece by Ellitt from around this time is his remarkable piano soundtrack for the abstract film Tusalava by New Zealander experimental cinema pioneer (and later kinetic sculpture builder) Len Lye. (There are conflicting accounts as to the fate of Ellitt’s soundtrack for Tusalava; several sources say—in contradiction to the version of the film in my possession—the music was performed live at the first screening but thereafter lost.)

March 12, 2011, 12:00pm

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Kurt Schwitters: “Third Part: Scherzo—Trio—Scherzo”

From the work Ursonate (1922-32)

A crucial landmark in 20th-century sonic art, Kurt Schwitters‘ Ursonate is likely much better known by poets than by musicians. It is perhaps the most famous exemplar of sound poetry, an explicitly performative genre of verbal art that operates in a domain between conventional poetic recitation and the nonreferential expression of music. In the words of contemporary poet Steve McCaffery, the object of sound poetry is the “liberation and promotion of the phonetic and subphonetic features of language to the state of a materia prima for creative, subversive endeavors.”

The sound poem was very much in the air in the early 20th century, to the extent that Schwitters’ Ursonate represents not so much a pioneering work of the genre but rather a kind of classical apex of its mature form. This is signaled even by the title of the work, which references the musical genre of the sonata, on whose carefully balanced form Schwitters’ poem was deliberately modeled.

The Ursonate was developed over a ten-year period from 1922 to 1932, the year in which its “score” was first published. Schwitters’ score consists of a precisely notated invented language complete with indications for tempo and volume. Like a musical score, Schwitters’ notation leaves much to the discretion of the performer, and many interpretations of the work have been made over the years. Schwitters’ own performance of the Ursonate resurfaced in 1992 through the hands of the Dutch composer Dick Raaymakers. The date of the performance is unknown.

The complete Schwitters performance, in its 40-minute duration, is a unique and powerful experience, though not for the faint of heart.

March 06, 2011, 7:44am

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Colin McPhee: Tabuh-Tabuhan, part I (1936)

From the album Tabuh-Tabuhan

The Canadian composer Colin McPhee was born in Montreal in 1900.  He lived in New York in the late 1920s, where he was actively involved in the city’s thriving scene for modern music; McPhee consorted during this time with the circle of American composers known as the “ultra-modernists,” comprising among others Dane Rudhyar, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford Seeger.  It was around this time that he was exposed to a recording of Balinese gamelan music.

From 1931 to 1938, McPhee lived in Bali, where his wife, Jane Belo, was conducting anthropological research.  During this time, McPhee undertook a thorough study of the musical traditions of the island.  His book Music in Bali, published only after his death in 1964, was a groundbreaking study in the fledgling discipline of ethnomusicology and is still seen as a crucial reference work on its topic.

McPhee’s 1936 composition Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra, premiered in Mexico City under the baton of Carlos Chávez, represents one of the earliest attempts for forge a genuine syncretism of “classical” and “world” music traditions, a trend that would become one of the dominant tendencies in the later 20th century, with results ranging from fascinating to unfortunate. Tabuh-Tabuhan, scored for a conventional orchestra plus what McPhee called a “nuclear gamelan” (two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba glockenspiel, and two Balinese gongs) goes beyond mere exoticism to seek a sincere fusion of disparate musical traditions.  The work also highlights the link between compositional appropriations of non-Western musical styles and the emergence of minimalism, which McPhee’s composition anticipates by some 30 years.

January 13, 2011, 4:40pm

A photo from the 1931 German Radio Exhibition in Berlin.  The original caption reads:

“Was man auf der Berliner Rundfunk-Aussstellung sehen wird! Eine Radio-Tabakspfeife, welche das angenehme des Rauchens mit dem des Radiohörens verbindet.”  (“What you’ll see at the Berlin Radio Exhibition!  A radio-tobacco pipe, which combines the pleasure of smoking with that of listening to the radio.”)

Judging by the look on this fellow’s face, it seems there might be something other than tobacco in that pipe.

April 28, 2010, 3:00pm

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Ruth Crawford Seeger: String Quartet, third movement, “Andante” (1931)

From the album Chamber Works

One of the most important and neglected musical figures of the early 20th century, Ruth Crawford associated with the “ultramodernist” circle of American composers in the 1920s, including Dane Rudhyar, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Seeger.  These composers championed a radical break with European musical traditions, and thus represented an alternative to the dominant neoclassical orientation of composers such as Aaron Copland and Walter Piston.

Crawford composed her String Quartet in 1931, while she was studying in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Upon returning from Europe, she married Seeger, and in 1936 the couple move to Washington, D.C., in order to work on New Deal projects for the preservation and dissemination of American folk music.

The remarkable third movement of this quartet is bereft of anything that could be called a melody. The music begins with gently surging tones in close proximity, weaving together to form a hypnotically dissonant sound-fabric.  As the piece progresses, the strings move slowly upward in pitch and the music gradually becomes louder and more discordant.  The tension built up by these grating sonorities finally explodes the texture: a violent, expressionistic outburst is followed by a sudden downward cascade of tones, as if a cord had snapped and the slow upward ratcheting were undone in an instant. The movement ends as it began, with ominous pulsations in the low strings.

Comparable only to the contemporary work of Varese, this music anticipates the later development of “sound mass” or Klangkomposition by Xenakis, Ligeti, and Penderecki in the 1950s and 60s.

February 16, 2010, 10:50am

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Stefan Wolpe: Suite im Hexachord. Second movement, “Pastorale” (1936)

From the album Music for Any Instruments

Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) is a lamentably under-appreciated German composer who throughout his creative life sought to synthesize the most advanced strains of European musical modernism with other, more popular elements, whether political songs, Middle Eastern traditional music, or Afro-American jazz.

In the 20s Wolpe encountered Ferruccio Busoni and H. H. Stuckenschmidt, and spent some time at the Bauhaus, where he was deeply influenced by the school’s utopian and inter-media aesthetics.  In 1933 Wolpe studied with Anton Webern, whose highly analytic approach to twelve-tone composition is reflected in much of Wolpe’s later work.  After emigrating to the U.S. in 1938, Wolpe took a series of teaching positions in the eastern part of the country, including Director of Music at Black Mountain College from 1952 to 1956.  He remained in the U.S. for the rest of his life.

Suite im Hexachord, written for oboe and clarinet, is a fine example of Wolpe’s ability to infuse the supposedly severe and “intellectual” method of twelve-tone composition with playfulness and lyricism.

January 04, 2010, 10:23am