Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism

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Instruments for New Music

Instruments for New Music

Sound, Technology, and Modernism

Thomas Patteson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2016 by Thomas Patteson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Patteson, Thomas.

Instruments for new music : sound, technology, and modernism / Thomas Patteson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-520-28802-7 (pbk : alk. paper)

isbn 978-0-520-96312-2 (ebook)

1. Musical instruments. 2. Music and technology—History. 3. Electronic musical instruments—History. 4. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title.

ML460.P347    2016

784.1909'04—dc23

2015028397

Manufactured in the United States of America

25   24   23   22   21   20   19   18   17   16

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

For Audrey and Felix

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1        Listening to Instruments

2        The Joy of Precision: Mechanical Instruments and the Aesthetics of Automation

3        The Alchemy of Tone: Jörg Mager and Electric Music

4        Sonic Handwriting: Media Instruments and Musical Inscription

5        A New, Perfect Musical Instrument: The Trautonium and Electric Music in the 1930s

6        The Expanding Instrumentarium

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

1. Excerpt of the piano roll for Hans Haass’s Intermezzo (1927)

2. Juxtaposition of a painting by Fernand Léger and a drawing of a drilling machine (1923)

3. Technical illustration of the Welte-Mignon reproducing piano

4. Cover of Musik und Maschine, special issue of Musikblätter des Anbruch (1926)

5. Oskar Schlemmer’s costume sketches for the Triadic Ballet

6. Schematic representation of the Triadic Ballet’s overall structure

7. Paul Hindemith composing on a piano roll (ca. 1926)

8. An artist’s rendering of Lee de Forest’s Audion Piano (1915)

9. Technical draft of Jörg Mager’s crank-operated electric instrument (ca. 1924)

10. Léon Theremin and Jörg Mager (1927)

11. Jörg Mager and an assistant in the laboratory (1927)

12. Jörg Mager’s notation system for the division of the octave into seventy-two equal intervals

13. Jörg Mager playing the three-manual Partiturophon (ca. 1930)

14. Photoelectric cells

15. Diagrammatic representation of sound-film playback

16. Oskar Fischinger, detail from Ornamente Ton (Ornament tone) display card, circa 1932

17. Rudolf Pfenninger at work on his sonic handwriting

18. Friedrich Trautwein with the first model of the Trautonium (ca. 1930)

19. The electroacoustic laboratories of the Radio Research Section (1928)

20. Paul Hindemith’s sketch for the first movement of Des kleinen Elektromusikers Lieblinge

21. The Orchestra of the Future?? from the 1932 German Radio Exhibition

22. The Trautonium on the cover of Radio-Craft magazine, March 1933

23. The Telefunken-Trautonium, also known as the Volkstrautonium

24. One of the few known advertisements for the Volkstrautonium

25. The three-voice Trautonium (ca. 1936)

26. The five-voice Partiturophon (ca. 1934)

27. The inventor as hero. Bust of Jörg Mager by Heinrich Jobst

Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without the involvement of many wonderful friends and colleagues. Those I name here are only the foremost.

Instruments for New Music began as a PhD dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, where it was researched and written from 2010 to 2013. To my advisor, Emily Dolan, who patiently shepherded the project from its humble beginnings, I owe my sincerest gratitude. Committee members Carolyn Abbate, Jeffrey Kallberg, and John Tresch saw the project through to completion and offered invaluable guidance along the way. I am also deeply grateful for the kindness and warmth of Penn music department faculty and staff Lawrence Bernstein, Alfreda Frazier, Maryellen Malek, Jairo Moreno, Carol Muller, Guy Ramsey, Timothy Rommen, and Margaret Smith Deeney.

In the process of revising the dissertation into a book, many people have offered both general critiques and pointed readings of particular passages: my thanks to Peter Donhauser, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Cindy Keefer, and Deirdre Loughridge for lending their eyes and minds to this project.

Douglas Kahn, in addition to his extensive feedback on the text, provided counsel and encouragement every step of the way, for which I cannot thank him enough.

Thanks as well to Jonathan Coopersmith and Paul Bryan at the Curtis Institute of Music for their help in securing financial support for the publication of this book, and to Curtis library staff Michelle Oswell, Emily Butler, and Molly O’Brien for their help during the final stages of research and writing.

The staff at University of California Press was wonderfully helpful in guiding me through the process of turning my manuscript into a book: sincerest thanks to Bradley Depew, Zuha Khan, Aimée Goggins, Rachel Berchten, and above all my editor, Mary Francis. My copyeditor Barbara Armentrout and my indexer Suzanne Bratt showed remarkable patience and thoroughness in putting the manuscript through its final paces.

Finally, I’m grateful to my parents, my family, and my wife, Audrey, and my son, Felix, for their love and support over the years. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Thomas Patteson

Philadelphia, May 2015

1

Listening to Instruments

Music is of the imagination,

but the imagination is of the sound

and the sound is of the instruments.¹

—Robert Donington

The demand for new instruments resounded at the dawn of the twentieth century. Suddenly, Ferruccio Busoni declared in his 1907 Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, one day it became clear to me: the development of music is impeded by our instruments. [...] In their scope, their sound, and their performative possibilities, our instruments are constrained, and their hundred chains shackle the would-be creator as well.² In his Art of Noises manifesto of 1913, Luigi Russolo denounced the symphony orchestra as a hospital for anemic sounds and called for new ways of exploring the unlimited domain of acoustic phenomena. Edgard Varèse declared in 1916, We have a great need for new instruments. [...] I refuse to submit to sounds that have already been heard. I seek new technical means which can allow and sustain any kind of expression of thought.³ Two years later, the Russian composer Joseph Schillinger foresaw the perfection of instruments through the electrification of music and asserted that from then on, the development of music will go hand in hand with science.⁴ Summing up these sentiments, the American physicist John Redfield wrote in 1926 that "the music of any age depends upon the kind of musical instruments which that age possesses. Composers can go no further than the possibilities of the instruments for which they write.⁵ Among the many messianic visions of artistic renewal in the early twentieth century, these proclamations were distinguished by their technological emphasis. While others sought rejuvenation in folk traditions, popular music and American jazz, classical and baroque genres, or constructivist approaches to composition such as the twelve-tone technique, for these musicians the only solution was a fundamental change of the sonic apparatus itself"—a new instrumentarium.⁶

The call for new instruments did not long go unanswered. During the fifteen-year span of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), which held sway between the end of the First World War and the Nazi seizure of power, Germany and its neighbors buzzed with technological experiments in music. Mechanical instruments such as the player piano, originally intended to reproduce the popular hits of the day and immortalize the interpretations of great performers, were refunctioned as superhuman machines capable of realizing musical designs unplayable by ten fingers. Electric instruments offered performing musicians new interfaces and sound-generating circuitry, opening up unexplored worlds of timbre and tone. Finally, recording media such as gramophone records and optical sound film were used not to capture but to produce sound according to the composer’s wishes, generating musical possibilities beyond the bounds of familiar instruments. From the mid-1920s until the fall of the Republic—and even, to a lesser extent, during the Nazi period—these new instruments stood at the center of the furious artistic debates of the day. Concerts and festivals provided public forums for the technologies and their enthusiasts, music journals published dispatches on the latest developments and dedicated special issues to the topic, inventors demonstrated their creations throughout Europe, and composers both obscure and established set out to create music for these devices. The instrumental innovations of the early twentieth century were not merely isolated experiments but rather part of a systematic, wide-ranging investigation into the technological foundations of sound and its implications for the art of music.⁷

A hundred years later, musicians take for granted what for Busoni and his ilk was a daring proposition. From a purely quantitative standpoint, the ways of producing, manipulating, and disseminating sound have grown exponentially in the last century. Out of a potentially infinite catalog of possibilities, consider just a few examples: ubiquitous university courses and curricula in electronic music and music and technology, the massive consumer market for synthesizers and other electronic instruments, and the proliferation of computer-based interfaces of all kinds, from highly abstract computer music languages to the plethora of apps for cell phones and tablets. But it is not only the sheer number of instruments now available that is significant; it is how these devices—digital, analog, and acoustic—reshape the fundamental parameters of the art. Instruments make music in a double sense: they create the sounds, but they also forge connections to the aesthetic, social, and metaphysical realities that give these sounds meaning, charging them with the current of human significance. What music is depends, to a large degree, on what instruments can do. The realization of this fundamental interdependence between music and technology is a legacy of the inventions, debates, and performances whose story I tell in this book.

Some of these things will be familiar from the history of what, since about 1950, has been known as electronic music, which has been explored at great length in both general and specialist sources. Indeed, this history is by now so well-trodden that it has almost attained the status of a myth. By this I don’t meant simply something that is not true; I mean a sort of history by osmosis, a common or vernacular understanding that seeps into public consciousness from various sources of information. (Most historical knowledge is, in this sense, mythic.) Instruments for New Music is a product of both my fascination with electronic music and my discontent with its conventional history—my sense that the very concept of electronic music is too limiting and actually forecloses new perspectives on the relationship between sound, art, and technology in twentieth-century culture.

Perhaps the most basic characteristic of the myth of electronic music is the way it maps onto the chronology of the twentieth century. The exhaustion of the orchestra, the visionary artist stifled by the lack of appropriate tools, the appeal to a distant future in which composers’ dreams could at last be realized—these tropes form the pillars of this historical narrative. The career of Varèse, in particular, is the touchstone here: after composing a number of groundbreaking works that stretched the limits of the orchestra, his frustration with existing instruments led him to abandon composition in the late 1930s. Only after World War II, with the availability of magnetic tape and the founding of the first studios for electronic music, was he finally able to attain his ideal of absolute artistic control.⁸ This story, as told and retold by music historians, neatly bisects the twentieth century into an early period of prophetic speculation and a later phase of genuine artistic accomplishment. Consequently, everything that came before the emergence of electronic music around 1950 is consigned to a pre-history of dubious value: if these earlier events are considered at all, they are often relegated to the role of anticipating or foreshadowing later developments. In this book, I try to understand the technological endeavors of the early twentieth century in their own terms. Only then, I believe, can we begin to figure out how these activities relate to the bigger historical picture, not as predecessors or preludes, but as integral elements of modern culture.

There is another problem. The very concept of electronic music too often implies that in the twentieth century music somehow became technological, and it highlights modern sound apparatus at the cost of obscuring the material foundations of music throughout history.⁹ (In an odd way, in many contexts electronic music has become vaguely synonymous with music and technology.) Further, the myth of electronic music conflates the technological changes undergone in the twentieth century with a particular, admittedly hugely important branch of technology: namely, electronics. Consequently, phenomena such as the unique inventions of Russolo and Harry Partch or the refunctioning of traditional instruments through unconventional playing techniques are typically explained as appendages to electronic music, rather than being seen as manifestations of an overarching category of activity. Electronic music, in short, offers too narrow a conceptual framework to encompass the far-flung technological extensions of twentieth-century music. What is needed, and what I hope this book will provide, is a greater sense of continuity both between musical instruments new and old and between technology and the human conditions within which it exists.

Indeed, the biggest problem with the story of electronic music is the way it tends to be told in isolation from the larger history of twentieth-century culture. The progression from the first electronic instruments to tape machines to synthesizers and computers is depicted as a natural unfolding of technological forms; history becomes a timeline of inventions and innovations, laid out with all the taxonomical neatness of a scientific exhibit. But the history of instruments, when properly told, concerns not just the objects themselves but also what they promise, portend, and make possible. The controversies surrounding the movement for new instruments in the early twentieth century both echoed and influenced the broader debates about the role of technology in modern society: musicians’ deepening engagement with technology, far from being merely a search for new sounds, constitutes one of the primary vectors through which music in the twentieth century opens out into other fields of thought and action, from aesthetics to politics, science, and philosophy.

My purpose in this book is not to champion a kind of technological reductionism—throwing back the curtain to reveal the machines behind the music. The technical and aesthetic threads of music are intertwined through and through: instruments are technologies of enchantment.¹⁰ Like all artifacts, they are products of human brains and bodies, shot through with imagination, will, and desire. The study of instruments need not represent a challenge to traditional humanistic concerns; on the contrary, it could help resuscitate aesthetics in its radical, original sense: the science of perception and feeling.¹¹ This means, on the one hand, that technologies cannot be fully comprehended apart from the human contexts in which they emerge. On the other hand, the study of art must encompass the material means of cultural production. Tracing the contours of what has been called the instrumentality of music is not a question of exposing aesthetic experience as the subjective by-product of an underlying material reality, but rather of grasping how the spell of art is technologically cast.¹²

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

There was no common musical aesthetic uniting the various figures brought together in this book. While they shared a vision of the radical reform of music through modern technology, they were motivated by distinct and sometimes mutually antagonistic objectives.¹³ They disagreed about the kind of instruments worth pursuing, about the musical potential even of given devices, about how the new instruments fit into existing habits of music making, and about the role of technology in culture at large. In short, the movement for new instruments was not a monolithic project but rather an arena in which different worldviews collided. The underlying motivation for the disparate undertakings recounted in the following pages was the search for new musical possibilities, new foundations of creative work. The technological enthusiasm of the age was driven by a kind of musical fundamentalism, a desire to bypass worn-out means of expression and get one’s hands on sound itself. New instruments allowed the artists of the time to explore the outer limits of artistic possibility. As one observer noted in 1927, The boldest artists are groping in the dark of an unexplored space. What they discover there is difficult to measure with the old yardsticks; it is absolutely otherwise.... Whether it is a dead end or the path to a new century, a narrow, arduous borderland or a vast, fertile country, no one can say. Significantly, the examples given of these threshold phenomena were all technological experiments: the investigation of the continuum between tone and noise, the division of the semitone into quarter tone and smaller values, and the mechanical reproduction of music.¹⁴

Technology in twentieth century music is typically associated with modernism in its antiromantic, scientistic, and objective tendencies. Likewise, the technological enthusiasm of the Weimar period was understood at the time as a manifestation of the New Sobriety (neue Sachlichkeit), which stood for a down-to-earth, unsentimental attitude toward art and society. Many of the figures in this book—among them Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, László Moholy-Nagy, and Rudolf Pfenninger—saw the new instruments as embodiments of modern values such as clarity, order, and control. They embraced a rigorous, quasi-scientific ideal of music in opposition to the image of the inspired artist inherited from the nineteenth century. But this matter-of-fact mindset was by no means universal among advocates of the new instruments. Others, such as Jörg Mager, Oskar Schlemmer, and Oskar Fischinger, wove modern technology into a poetic and visionary worldview. In the language of expressionist aesthetics, they sought to project themselves into the cosmos and extend the scope of their experience to a superhuman scale.¹⁵ Embracing the machine as a means of spiritual transport, they gave themselves over to technological sublime, in which the artifacts built to control natural forces become objects of the fascination and awe that those forces once evoked.¹⁶ Such unlikely alliances between mysticism and modernity were probably what the philosopher Ernst Cassirer had in mind when he bemoaned the romantics of technology who exalted inventions that they did not understand.¹⁷ Cassirer and other critics feared that the newest technologies offered an up-to-date guise for dangerous antimodern attitudes.

The split between what might be called machine modernism and machine romanticism reflected a broader duality in the early twentieth century between an infatuation with modern life and an idealistic quest for alternatives to a disenchanted reality. This opposition was illustrated in Oskar Schlemmer’s colorful characterization of the bifurcated artistic culture of the Bauhaus in the early 1920s: "On the one hand, the influence of oriental culture, the cult of India, also a return to nature... communes, vegetarianism, Tolstoyism, reaction against the war; and on the other hand, the American spirit [Amerikanismus], progress, the marvels of technology and invention, the urban environment."¹⁸ In short, there were two broad strains of technological enthusiasm: One embraced technology as the embodiment of the modern Zeitgeist, while the other saw it as a way to transcend profane reality and reach a state of timelessness or ecstasy.

Just as the new sound technologies brought together artists of opposing aesthetic positions, so too did they throw open the gates separating the various forms of art. One of the most remarkable effects of the technologization of sound was to draw music into the synesthetic gyre of the early twentieth century. This multi- (or inter-)media impulse, too, belonged to the spirit of the age: the painter Paul Klee spoke for many when he dismissed the hallowed distinctions between the arts laid down in Gottfried Lessing’s classic eighteenth-century aesthetic treatise Laoköon as learned nonsense.¹⁹ Indeed, one of the primary reasons why music historians have overlooked the technological undertakings of the Weimar period is that very few of the movement’s major figures were professional musicians. Stuckenschmidt, for example, though trained as a composer, made his mark as a critic and impresario. The Hungarian painter and photographer Moholy-Nagy was one of the central theorists of technological experimentation in the arts, and his writings exerted a foundational influence on the search for new instrumental modalities in the 1920s. The choreographer Oskar Schlemmer, who taught alongside Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, developed an abstract, puppetlike form of dance and costume design whose musical equivalent he sought in mechanical instruments. The inventors Jörg Mager and Friedrich Trautwein, though at best amateur musicians, were able to envision new forms of music on the basis of their electroacoustic investigations into sound. Finally, the pioneers of optical sound film after 1930—Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger, and Rudolf Pfenninger—were all filmmakers by training, and they translated their skills in that medium to a new form of music-making based on cinematic techniques such as splicing and montage.

The intermingling of artistic media points toward another overlooked aspect of Weimar-era experimentation: virtually all the new instruments of the period were based more or less closely on existing forms of media technology. As the mass-media empires of broadcasting and recording rose around them, the musicians and artists of the Weimar Republic sought to seize the industries’ tools and turn them into instruments for new music. Moholy-Nagy provided a catalytic jolt to the movement with his 1922 essay Production-Reproduction, published in the Dutch art journal De Stijl.²⁰ Here he formulated what would become the credo of like-minded artists: a turn from merely reproductive applications (duplication, dissemination) to generative or productive uses—that is, the creation of new forms of art that exploited the unique capabilities of modern technologies.

Artists of the period did not universally oppose media as means of communication—indeed, most believed that recording and radio transmission had great potential as instruments of mass enlightenment—but they resisted what they saw as the one-dimensional function of modern technologies in propagating existing forms of art. In some cases, turning media into instruments was simply a question of deliberate artistic refunctioning: for example, inscribing directly onto recording formats such as player piano rolls or optical sound film. In the case of early electric instruments, however, the relationship to existing media technologies was more remote, and thus the act of repurposing was more technically involved: radio components, intended to receive signals, could be cobbled together in new configurations to create and control electrically generated tones. One contemporary observer wrote that electric instruments, whose technical components are familiar from the domain of radio electronics, do not want to be an ear, but rather a voice.²¹

For many of the protagonists of this book, then, the new instruments became a vehicle for technological critique: they reimagined media not as passive transmitters of preformed content but as tools whose function and meaning were determined by their users.²² From the standpoint of the later technological history of the twentieth century, Moholy-Nagy’s duality of production-reproduction anticipates the emerging categories of instruments and media: tools of artistic expression, on the one hand, and means of communication, on the other. Media scholar Jonathan Sterne has argued that the conventional distinction between musical instruments and reproductive media has long failed to do justice to reality: instead of a hard line between the two, history shows a continuous flow between productive and reproductive sound technologies.²³ The distinction between media and instrument, in short, is not embedded in the objects themselves but emerges from patterns of use. Technologies do not impose upon their players a uniform technique but rather, at most, inbuilt tendencies or inertial forces—attractors, so to speak, in the phase space of creative possibility.

TECHNOLOGY IN THE BALANCE

While the search for new instruments was buoyed by an attitude of what might be called technological euphoria, this optimistic mood was by no means universal in the early twentieth century. The early twentieth century was a time of profound technological anxiety in European culture, and the movement for new instruments both reflected and shaped broader debates about technology writ large. The origins of this debate reach back into the second half of the previous century, as engineers and scientists sought to raise the cultural standing of their professions by showing how material progress benefitted not only the body but also the mind and spirit. One of the foremost protagonists in this project was the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894). Helmholtz viewed his research as a bridge between the older tradition of the humanities, or Kulturwissenschaften, with their qualitative and holistic orientation, and the ascendant natural sciences, which were