Music: Electronic Medley

On the stage of the Grand Music Hall of Basel, Switzerland one day last week sat two strange contraptions. One resembled a telephone switchboard with a set of loudspeakers attached. The other looked like a small spinet but was connected to two loudspeakers and a lute-shaped soundbox. The gadgets were known as the “Mixturtrautonium” and the “Ondes Martenot.” Both produce more or less musical tones electronically, and they were to be featured soloists in a concert for the delegates to the first International Congress of Electronic Music and Musique Concrète.

Slithery Glissando. The Mixturtrau-tonium, originally developed by a German physics professor in 1930 and later refined by Engineer-Composer Oskar Sala. is a complicated monster operated by pressing the fingers on two strings through which runs a weak electric current. By shifting his fingers along the strings much like a violinist and by working switches and pedals, the player can—at least theoretically—produce notes and pre-set chords of every imaginable color, frequency and strength. But so far the Mixturtrautonium can be played only by Engineer Sala.

The Ondes Martenot, a less versatile but considerably simpler instrument, is the brainchild of Maurice Martenot, a slight, bespectacled Frenchman with a bumblebee mustache and a practical outlook. The Martenot has been manufactured and sold (190 models at about $700 each), can be mastered in a few months, is already used by the Paris Opera and theaters. It has had 518 compositions written for it, some by such first-rate composers as Honegger and Milhaud. It utilizes a keyboard and a metalized ribbon that produces slithery glissandos, can control color and volume through other accessories, but cannot play chords.

Incoherent Themes. His introduction of the Martenot in 1928 made Maurice Martenot a pioneer of electronics in music.* His argument: the orchestra can be made more subtle by use of an instrument capable of sounds that bridge the tonal gaps between strings and winds, give pitch to the dull thud of the bass drums, play lower than a double bass and higher than a piccolo. The idea has caught on: dozens of electronic instruments have been developed, the latest of which is RCA’s Synthesizer, unveiled four months ago, which can reproduce the sound of any musical instrument.

As the Basel concert opened, Mlle. Ginette Martenot, sister of the instrument’s builder, started off with the Ondes Martenot. With remarkable technique, she coaxed from the instrument a synthetic cascade of notes, often shrill, occasionally pleasant, accompanied by a wildly modernistic orchestral background. She got a big hand from the audience. After intermission, Oskar Sala sat down before his Mixturtrautonium. To a tape-recorded background of shrill whistles, gongs, rattles and electronic drum sounds, he compounded the cacophony with his wildly incoherent themes. A third of the audience left before the end; those who stayed filled the hall with whistles and catcalls. Said a critic the next day: “As long as we do not have electronic ears, this noise must be qualified as inhuman.”

* In 1920, Leon Theremin had exhibited the “Theremin,” prototype of all electronic instruments operated by varying the high frequency oscillations of radio vacuum tubes.