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Since the beginning of time, humans have been highly inventive and resourceful in finding and making new ways to communicate using sounds. This has usually involved taking materials or technology to hand and creating something new out of them. Just as early ancestors fashioned flutes from hollow bones, so more recent innovators have used electronic machines to make music. This section gives a selective survey of inventions and music-making devices some may be familiar, some unusual and some just plain odd.
As well as being a vital part of our musical heritage, the sound of the human voice has been used and adapted in unusual ways in the twentieth century. In addition to the familiar instruments heard in classical and modern music, there are a multitude of musical oddities from around the world. During the twentieth century, inventors have seized upon the musical possibilities of the mechanical and electrical technologies around them and made strange and wonderful contraptions. The attentive listener to recorded and live music will sometimes hear unfamiliar sound effects, called for by the composer to evoke a particular mood or idea. One of the most significant techniques of the twentieth century was musique concrète, which was a precursor to modern-day sampling technology.
In April 1948, Pierre Schaeffer, a technician at the Radiodiffusion Française in Paris, conceived his Etude aux chemins de fer (‘Study for trains’) it was the first piece of musique concrète. This innovative kind of music represented a new direction in music-making, distinct from earlier uses of electronic or mechanical machines to generate sounds.
Musique concrète was an experimental technique that combined pre-recorded sounds natural as well as musical to make musical compositions. Using only the earliest tape recorders, sounds were edited, played backwards and speeded up and down to create fascinating ‘sound-scapes’. Pierre Henry was a prolific composer of musique concrète and collaborated with Schaeffer on many compositions. Luciano Berio and Steve Reich are also key figures in musique concrète composition. Karlheinz Stockhausen combined electronic and concrète sounds to become a leader of avant-garde music making.
Four important studios were established for further experimentation in the areas of musique concrète and electronic music:
• Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, New York. Founded in 1951 by Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening.
• Studio für Elektronische Musik, Cologne. Used primarily to make electronically generated music, it was established by Herbert Eimert in 1951.
• Studio di Fonologia, Milan. Established in 1953, it was used by many avant-garde composers: Berio, Pousseur, Nono, Maderna and Cage.
• Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/ Musique (IRCAM), Paris. Established in 1976, this is a major centre for creativity and research in sound.
Repertoire
Varèse’s Poème électronique was performed by 400 loudspeakers at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Luciano Berio produced a celebrated piece, Thema (1958), using his wife Cathy Berberian’s voice reading from James Joyce’s Ulysses. One of the best-known compositions by Schaeffer and Henry is Le voyage (196162). Steve Reich’s Come Out (1966) loops spoken phrases to disturbing effect.
Related Instruments
The RCA Mk II music synthesizer, the most advanced of its time, was transferred to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1950s.
The history of music making includes a vast range of unusual, sometimes obscure, instruments. Many of these demonstrate the sheer serendipitous imagination of their inventors. A selection of some of the more interesting and surprising of these oddities is given below.
Bull Roarer
This most ancient of instruments is played by many peoples such as Aboriginals in Australia and Inuit in the Arctic. It is typically made from flat wood, at least 15 cm in length, with a shape incorporating notches on one edge. This is attached by a cord and swung above the head, making an unearthly roaring buzz, thought by ancient users to invoke magic powers, and more recently included in the Australian ballet score Corroboree of 1946.
Glass Armonica
Irishman Richard Pockrich excelled on this instrument in 1743. It is played by rubbing wetted fingers on the rims of glasses set in a frame, each glass being filled with a different quantity of water to tune its pitch. Benjamin Franklin’s version of 1761 used a treadle to operate a revolving row of glass discs half-immersed in a water tray to keep them moist. Mozart’s Quintet in C minor, K617, includes musical glasses.
Jingling Johnny
Also called a Turkish crescent or a Chinese pavilion, this exotic instrument possibly originated from the staff of a Central Asian shaman. Part of the Turkish military band sound that stimulated the late eighteenth-century European vogue for Turkish music, it consists of a long vertical pole hung with bells fixed to crescent-shaped cross pieces. Haydn is thought to have specified it for his ‘Military’ Symphony No. 100.
Thumb Piano
Also called a sansa, zeze or likembe, the thumb piano is an African musical instrument consisting of a set of tuned metal or bamboo strips of different lengths fastened to a soundboard. It sometimes has an attached resonator box or can be played inside a gourd to improve its sound. As the name suggests, the tuned strips are depressed and released by thumb or finger to give a liquid twangy sound.
The twentieth century saw an unprecedented explosion in new machines for making sound. Here is a selection of the most important and influential of such instruments.
Intonarumori
Luigi Russolo was a member of the Italian Futurists, who made art and objects to celebrate the new industrial machine age. Between 1913 and 1921 Russolo and Ugo Piatti designed a range of intonarumori (‘noise intoners’), that made various rumbles, crashes, booms and shrieks, many produced by turning a handle.
Mellotron
The mellotron was a keyboard instrument produced in England between 1963 and 1986. Depressing a key played a sound of up to eight seconds recorded on a magnetic tape. The Mellotron made a unique and instantly recognisable sound that became popular with 1960s and 1970s groups. The Moody Blues showed its symphonic side on Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Listen out for it in the Sci-Fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Ondes Martenot
Also called Ondes Musicales (‘musical waves’), this electronic musical instrument was first demonstrated in 1928 by the French inventor Maurice Martenot. Inside, thermionic valves produce oscillating frequencies in a similar way to the theremin. The latest version could alter the pitch using a keyboard. The composer Messiaen used its disembodied vocal-like sounds in his Turangalila Symphony.
Sampler and Drum Machine
As with the latest synthesizers, a sampler uses digital technology to make sounds. The difference is that, instead of generating an original synthetic sound, it actually ‘plays’ a mini digital recording of a sound. This could be anything a voice, a drum beat or even a milk bottle being dropped! In the late 1970s, a pioneering sampling musical instrument such as the Fairlight CMI was as expensive as a Ferrari sports car. By the mid 1990s, samplers were no more expensive than regular synthesizers. In the future, it is likely that dedicated hardware samplers will be forsaken for more versatile personal computers that can do the same thing.
Many people use samples from CDs or download them from the Internet. Others prefer to make their own, using the sampler to make a digital recording of the sound they want (often from other people’s records). Either way, the sample can then be played musically by connecting a keyboard to the sampler.
Drum machines have changed the approach to providing rhythm in music. There are two types: the type that produces a continuous beat to a pre-set pattern, and those that are played in ‘real time’ using sticks. A key example of the first type is Roland’s TR-606 Drumatix, introduced in 1981, which inspired a generation of dance-music mixers and audiences. Roger Linn’s LinnDrum, launched in 1986, is an influential instrument of the second type. It makes sampled drum sounds when special pads are hit.
Repertoire
‘Trans-Europe Express’ by synthesizer pioneers Kraftwerk was one of the most sampled records of the 1980s; its sounds were copied by many artists, notably Afrika Bambaataa on their ‘Planet Rock’.
Related Instruments
An important related piece of studio technology is the sequencer, a device programmed to trigger sequences of notes or beats on a linked synthesizer or sampler.
Theremin
Invented in 1920 by the Russian Leon Theremin, this instrument consists of a box containing thermionic valves producing oscillations, with antenna protruding from it. An expressive, ethereal continuous tone is produced, whose pitch can be altered by moving the hand towards and away from the antenna. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys featured it on ‘Good Vibrations’.
Trautonium
Assisted by Oskar Sala who became the instrument’s virtuoso, the German Friedrich Trautwein introduced the trautonium in 1930. Tones were produced by touching a fingerboard, altering the pitch of the oscillation which was then amplified through a loudspeaker. The composer Paul Hindemith was inspired to write a Concertina for Trautonium and Orchestra.
In an orchestral setting, it traditionally falls to the percussionist to contribute any special effects required for the music. Here are just a few of the unlikely contraptions that have found their way into musical scores.
• Bird Scare: a kind of rattle formerly found on every football terrace, it occurs in Havergal Brian’s Symphony No. 1 (1927).
• Cannon: the best-known occurrence of cannon is in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
• Chains: these can be shaken and dragged, and are called for in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (1901).
• Sandpaper: the rarely heard effect of rubbed sheets of sandpaper is featured in the Sandpaper Ballet (1954) by Leroy Anderson.
•Saw: popular in early twentieth-century music hall, this is played with a bow. Several composers have specified iit, notably Toshiro Mayuzumi in his Tone Pleromas 55 (1955).
• Spoons: a pair of ordinary spoons clicked together was a popular music hall turn and is heard in George Auric’s ballet Les Matelots (1924).
• Thunder sheet: the orchestral version uses a thin metal sheet, agitated by soft mallets. John Cage wanted five of them in his First Construction (1942).
• Typewriter: in the early twentieth century, this sound was heard in every office. Eric Satie in his Parade (1917) was one of several composers who wanted its percussive effect.
The human voice is our primeval musical instrument, with our earliest ancestors finding expression through their voices before thought was ever given to other sources of sound. Vocal music has been sung from the beginnings of recorded history; the Sumerians sang in their temples 5,000 years ago. In the West, traditions of singing have evolved from the plainchant of the middle ages, through seventeenth-century opera to today’s various music styles. Rather than survey the vast history of vocal music, this section considers some of the usual uses to which the voice has been put.
Repertoire
Ella Fitzgerald was probably the most accomplished jazz singer of the twentieth century. She was highly skilled at ‘scat’ singing, in which sung jazz phrases can resemble instruments such as the saxophone. This technique can be heard on many of her records. Dee Dee Bridgewater is also an outstanding modern exponent of this style of singing.
The avant-garde performance artist Laurie Anderson had an unexpected UK hit record in 1981 with ‘O Superman’, a part-spoken, part-sung hypnotic intonation using a digital vocoder device to shift the pitch of her voice.
With his 1976 hit ‘Show Me the Way’, the pop-rock guitarist Peter Frampton used a novel ‘voice tube’ effect unit that allowed him to alter the tone of his guitar by changing the shape of his mouth.
Related Instruments
Wendy Carlos famously used a vocoder, a synthesizer that uses voices to influence the quality of the sounds, to compose ‘Timesteps’ for the soundtrack (also available on CD) of Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange.