From Rusollo till Present
A History about the Art of Experimental Musical Instruments
Yuri Landman, June 6th 2019.
Often during my academic workshops participants have a big ? above their heads when I mention the many great inventors of musical instruments of the past 100 years. (and they’re not World of Warcraft quest givers.)
While having an after-beer with a few students in Graz recently, one student suggested I should write down a list of artists I had mentioned during the masterclass. Good input, and I decided to write this introductory article to give people a broader awareness of experimental musical instruments as an art form.
Ancient Instruments
The craft of building instruments goes back to basically the time people starting making music. Parts of bone flutes of about 43.000 years ago are the oldest archaeological artifacts. String instruments and drums followed later when the skills of human mankind evolved.
Musical Instrument Building as an Art Form
For the purpose of this story I limit myself to the modern age though. Before 1900 the motivation to develop new instruments could be regarded as an act of craftsmanship and hunt for better tools. If we look at the history of art we see two (for the sake of this story at least) prominent philosophies that changed the perception of what art is.
First there was the l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) that set art free from any purpose of necessity besides being art.
Second there was the Arts and Crafts movement that recognized the value or art in essentially any object that is made with a certain degree or artistic expression. Any tool or object can be valued as art. A simple example is for instance the beauty people experience in vintage car designs, or any other functional object that has a collectable quality.
Impact of Electricity on Contemporary Music
Many examples exist wherein science, interculturalism, welfare level, political zeitgeist, and art interact with each other and affect each other’s evolution. What is not so often mentioned in literature, is that one particular aspect of the industrial revolution had a massive impact on music: Electricity. The topic of experimental musical instruments can hardly be understood without that dominant influence taken in regard.
The radio, record player and tape recorders changed the way we listen to music. No longer is it necessary to experience music in a live setting. The music can be recorded and played at home. This not only separated sound from the actual performance, but also heavily changed the way we make music.
The Telharmonium, built by Thaddeus Cahill in 1896, was an early attempt to distribute music through telephone wires at houses. This was the first electronic musical instrument.
Prior to recorded music, music was passed on orally (folk music) or written as sheet music (classical music). With the arrival of recording equipment, it became possible to capture music in a new way.
Also the way it was recorded became a new art form itself. Pretty much every decade of the last hundred years featured new inventions, hence changing the sound of the music of that era. First it was just one mic, then a few and a mixer, then multi-channel recording and post mixing. New mics, new electric amplified instruments (Hammond organ, Rhodes piano, electric guitar and bass guitar), new electronic instruments (electronic organs and synths), effect pedals, samples, the computer… All of them had a big impact on the evolution of contemporary music.
Often new inventions created new techniques. A simple example is the microphone. Before the microphone existed, you had to sing as loud as possible to dominate the orchestra, for instance in opera. With the microphone it became in fashion to also sing with a whispering voice (Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas). It would be impossible to hear a metal singer’s grunting without a mic, even if he’d tried his best. Beat boxing uses the deep sounds from close mic-ing, etc..
Similar sound revolutions happened with the electric guitar and many other new devices. The list of examples is uncountable.
Luigi Russolo’s L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises)
If I’d put a dot on the timeline where instrument building became an individual art form, I’d call the year 1913. Luigi Russolo was an Italian futurist painter interested in music. In 1913 he wrote a letter to his composer friend Pratella in which he categorized a series of different noises.
The industrial revolution was fully invading the society with all kinds of sounds that were unheard before electric machines existed. The train, the factories, airplanes, war artillery, telegraphy, radio… All featured wild new sounds. Russolo had the visionary imagination these sounds had a musical quality. Only one problem: none of the existing musical instruments were able to replicate those exciting sounds. Hence he decided to build a series of Intonarumori (‘noise makers’) to solve this instrumentation gap. Big square boxes with mechanical devices hidden inside amplified with a horn sticking out of the boxes. Many people think the instruments are electronic, but they are actually acoustic.
Léon Theremin
In 1920 Léon Theremin invented the Theremin. A hocus pocus antenna device that approximates the sound of a singing saw or a female voice. Theremin was quite a cool guy. He went on world tour with his invention and meanwhile he was a Russian spy as well. He build all kinds or devices to spy on foreign embassies. A true James Bond villain avant la lettre!
A bit after Theremin’s invention several other electronic musical instruments were designed. A well-known French example is the Ondes Martenot (appearing in Good Vibrations of the Beach Boys). In Germany the Trautonium was invented. All of these devices are essentially synthesizers.
Edgard Varèse
Around the same period when Theremin was busy with his duo job as an inventor/secret service agent, the French composer Edgard Varèse started making compositions that often featured sirens as one of the used musical instruments. A war device added to the instrumentation. Also he used an anvil as a percussion instrument.
John Cage and Lou Harrison
Lou Harrison and John Cage started working at UCLA in the early 40s and both got fascinated about recordings of Indonesian gamelan music. They collaborated a lot during this time and the percussive compositions of both of them are very similar. Inspired by the odd non-Western timbres and scales they started collecting all kinds of industrial metal objects that have likeminded sounds if you hit them: car brake drums, circular saws, large springs, metal hemispheres, metal sheets.
With metal objects there is a simple rule: bang it and it sounds good!
Prepared Piano
A few years after their percussive works, Cage had to compose a piece for a modern dance performance. One problem: the performance room was too small for a percussion orchestra. Though there was a grand piano in it. Cage decided to modify the grand piano in the string field. By clamping objects between the strings he altered the sound of the piano radically. Almost identical to the percussion sounds he had achieved with found metal. His Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano is an excellent collection of compositions to hear what the effect is of this working method.
Harry Partch
Another American composer that also was active in the same period was Harry Partch. He is not so known as Cage and Harrison, but I regard him just as relevant cultural-historically. In 1923 he discovered Hermann von Helmholtz’s influential book Sensations of Tone. Soon after he destroyed all his musical scores and abandoned the 12-tone system to develop his own microtonal musical scales based on physics and maths (fractions). Most known is his 43-tonality diamond system. He wrote a difficult to read book Genesis of a Music that accurately describes his music philosophy and musical tuning systems. I recommend not to read it without first just enjoying the many docs that are available on YouTube. Much more fun!
Based on these scales he created a big amount of incredible musical instruments for his compositions. One of the funny reasons Partch remains such an unknown name is that his instruments are huge dinosaurs and totally unpractical for touring. He never left the U.S. with his gear. A few years ago European replicas were made and for the first time his compositions premiered in Europe.
Ivor Darreg
John Cage was handsome with his well-shaved face. Harrison had a fluffy funny looking beard. Partch’s beard was less well cut. But the wildest beard for sure belonged to Ivor Darreg. The beard is a good indicator for obscurity!
Darreg is even lesser known than Partch, but also a key figure in microtonality. In a nutshell, to keep the story simple, he divided the octave not in 12 equal steps, but instead researched 11, or 10 or 9 steps or whatever other equal division of the octave, resulting in odd musical intervals, hence new music.
Moondog
Talking of weird beards, there is always the ‘hold-my-beer’-guy in the system. Moondog was a blind street musician living in NYC, known as the Viking of 6th Avenue.
Moondog built many instruments. One of them is a triangular shaped percussion instrument with which he developed unique rhythmic patterns. His music is an odd mix of classical composed music, jazz and latin rhythms.
Here is where I leave the U.S. and make a short jump to Europe.
Philips NatLab, Stockhausen, BBC Radiophonic Workshop
My knowledge blocks a bit on this chapter. I’m not a super expert on the history of electronic music. I will enumerate some to my best knowledge though.
In the Netherlands composer Dick Raaymakers started working at NatLab, the research department of Philips. It was here where he started making electronic music with oscillators, tape machines and other technical laboratory equipment. By recording sounds, speeding up or slowing down the sounds and cut tiny parts of it and glue the tapes back together Raaymakers was able to achieve unearthly sounds as if they were coming from outer space.
Stockhausen worked at EMS and worked with similar equipment.
In the UK the BBC had the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A sound studio that made many sound clips for television series such as Doctor Who and advertisements. Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire are known early composers from this studio that gained fame at the end of their lives with their pioneering works. Oram afterwards invented her Oramics synths that could translate drawing into sound. She was not the first working on optical synths, in between 1937 and 1957 the Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin was working on this concept already.
Many other countries had similar R&D sound labs connected to television studios, audio companies and universities and also contributed to the evolution of electronic music.
During the 70s and up until present many Western countries still have highly specialized institutes dedicated to sound art research. In The Netherlands we have STEIM. EMS in Sweden, IRCAM in France, LOGOS in Belgium, etc.. These institutes have, most of the time, strong connections with the academic environment.
Bob Moog and the rise of the synthesizer
Bob Moog is the inventor of the first commercial synthesizer. While Raaymakers, Stockhausen, Oram and Derbyshire were working with oscillators, Moog developed the first synthesizer that went into production. Many other builders such as Buchla soon followed.
At first they build modular synths (walls of knobs and cables looking like an old telephone centre). The impracticality of these big devices was soon after solved by more compact all-in-one-casing devices such as the Minimoog and the Korg MS-20. These synthesizers work on a system called subtractive synthesis. After these monophonic synths the polyphonic synth were developed, followed by the FM synthesizers, digital samplers and nowadays computers.
I do regard this history of the synthesizer mainly a market driven invention process. Design-wise not really an aesthetic/artistic motivated visual art form, therefore I like to keep the info on it compact.
Electric Guitar
The electric guitar is mostly associated with pop music, or rock music. Not so much with the history of experimental music or modern classical music. Also, like the evolution of the synth, the electric guitar became the object it is nowadays because sales determined its success and development.
Many books have been written about the history of the electric guitar. Good to mention is that often new small inventions or additional devices such as the guitar pedals changed the playing techniques and vice versa. New playing techniques created a desire for new slightly changed guitar designs. Jimi Hendrix is probably the best known rock star that pushed the boundaries of what is possible with a guitar.
From the builders’ side, in my opinion, Leo Fender designed a series of groundbreaking models. A funny aspect about his work is that he could not play guitar. He made all kinds of odd design decisions as an engineer/dreamer that often failed heavily, but over time found a new player audience. The Jazzmaster for instance fails for most jazz guitarists, because of the heavy string resonance coming from the bridge construction. This later became a signature sound for many experimental noise rock bands, most notably Sonic Youth.
Fluxus
In the sixties the Fluxus art movement arose. Breaking down the barriers of what art was. It can also be regarded as the start of multimedia art.
John Cage was a prominent figure of this movement. He often used new invented instruments as a prominent ingredient for his compositions. Cage played on basically everything that makes sound during his life. He played on amplified cactuses and did a TV performance with kitchen machines. The young composer Frank Zappa did a likeminded performance with a few bikes. Charlotte Moorman played on Nam June Paiks TV cello and other objects.
In the Netherlands Paul Panhuysen and Remko Schaa started the Appolohuis. An art centre that became a crucial hub in Europe for the American Fluxus movement. Panhuysen and Schaa were artists themselves too. Panhuysen worked a lot with long string installations, also in collaboration with Ellen Fullman who spend her life-time career on long string installations. Schaa is known for his large installations with vast amounts of long, vibrating cables that rhythmically bang against a series of electric guitars.
Not specifically strongly connected with Fluxus, but the Swiss visual artist Jean Tinguely started making kinetic sound sculptures that often featured industrial sounds of the moving parts as a part of the art piece. Installation art nowadays often features a musical element. To keep this article compact I only touch this art form a little bit.
Also bit of an outsider in this storyline is the minimal art sculptor Harry Bertoia. He made large sets of identical tuned bars. Mounted in a socket, grouped in squares the bars bang against each other if you touch them.
Experimentation in Pop Music
Experiments in pop music mainly took place during studio recording sessions. With the arrival of the multichannel recorders Beatles and soon after other acts started exploring and recording the wildest possible experiments. Mostly out of sight from the audience many tricks and new tools became part of the craftsmanship of producers.
A few artists developed new tools as well themselves. Godley & Cream developed the Gizmotron, that commercially failed. Soon after the E-bow (featured prominently in Bowie’s Heroes) would turn out a better solution for a somewhat identical sound effect.
Brian Eno worked a lot with cutting short tape loops. Together with Robert Fripp he developed large sound-over-sound tape loops they called Frippertronics.
Independent from each other Keith Rowe and Fred Frith adopted Cage’s preparation techniques on electric guitar.
Also independent from each other Silver Apples, Kraftwerk, and Throbbing Gristle built their own electronic systems and synths that became a prominent part of their performances.
No Wave and Industrial
In NYC, around 1978, Fluxus together with free jazz and punk became the inspiration of a new generation, creating the most eclectic anarchistic (hardly) pop music genre in history: No Wave. All traditional musical skills were abandoned. This anarchy soon let to new techniques and tools.
A prominent figure in this scene was Glenn Branca. Branca started modifying guitars, tuning them radical different and soon started making his own instruments. Some guitar based, while others were heavily inspired by the works of the earlier mentioned Harry Partch. Branca worked with large guitar orchestras and Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore were part of that for a few years. They adopted Branca’s modified guitars and tunings and integrated it in the music of their own band Sonic Youth.
Another member of Brancas orchestra was the percussionist Z’EV. He played similar to the concept of Cage and Harrison with a vast collection of metal objects. In Berlin Einstürzende Neubauten (mainly its band member FM Einheit) built a large collection of piezo-amplified percussion instruments, Test Department from the U.K. performed with oil drums as their percussion.
By mentioning Throbbing Gristle, Z’EV, Neubauten, and Test Department we’ve entered the industrial music. Basically they are Rusollo’s grandchildren: mixing futurism with punk rock.
Bart Hopkins Experimental Musica Instruments Magazine
We’ve arrived in the 80s. I’d say this is the point where the historic overview gets more complex. The art form starts to branch off in several directions. Many different artists from different scenes and regions started making all kinds of sound devices for different purposes.
As stated in the beginning of the article, for a long time inventing new instruments is not regarded an artform itself. So little literature exists that describes it in a clear comprehensive overview. There is luckily one exception though.
From 1985 till 1999 Bart Hopkin ran the magazine Experimental Musical Instruments covering most known examples of handmade musical inventions build in the last 100 years. Stuff that is not mentioned in most musicological books about instruments. Largely overlooked at musicology departments up to the present.
After Hopkin quit his magazine he produced a series of in-depth books about the construction of several types of instruments: one book about marimbas, one about slap tubes, about kalimbas, about amplification methods, about instruments for children. Musical Instrument Design is his main book and functions as a great starting point if you want to explore several types of instruments.
Another functional DIY book is Handmade Electronic Music by Nicolas Collins. You could say the bible of noise synth building. If you wanna dive into circuitries this is your thing!
I’d like to mention two artists of this era that have struck me most.
In Belgium a friend tipped me on George Smits. A sound artist that worked with long strings, steel and styrofoam. Unfortunately Smits died somewhere in his 50s I guess, and very little can be found about him online. On YouTube there is the Flemish 20 min doc Klankobjecten. Although spoken in Flemish, the doc features a lot of sound samples, and pretty sure German- or English-speaking people can get a good grasp of what is explained.
A more known key-role artist is Hans Reichel. Reichel built a series of wonderful 3rd bridge guitars years before I started building them. But his most remarkable invention is the Daxophone. Just look it up on YouTube and enjoy the funny burps, farts, squeaks and animal screams that can be produced with that remarkable instrument! Especially the guy in this YouTube guy is super good on this instrument!
The Impact of Internet
From 2000 internet started arriving in every house. Oddmusic.com is an old info site on this topic, still online. The site features a beautiful gallery of rare inventions, worth visiting!
I started building in 2001. In 2006 I started working for bands and in 2009 I got a request to develop a DIY workshop for a Belfast festival. That request was an explosion in my career as an inventor/artist. I quit my job as a graphic designer and started touring in Europe. Non-stop for ten years now.
I quickly got informed about and in contact with Derek Holzer who hosted workshops years before I started and has a likeminded job I have. But more in the field of electronic circuitries (synths), while I focus mainly on amplified instruments (strings, percussion and kalimbas) through magnetic pickups.
Many inventors followed and began setting up workshops in more recent years, though most of them are more local active unfortunately.
YouTube
Perhaps I’m in a bubble, but I have the impression the art of making your own instrument became increasingly popular in the last decade. I think part of this phenomenon is the vast library of YouTube tutorials about basically everything you want to build.
Circuit bending (making a synth by hacking an existing electronic circuitry) was started in the 60s by pioneer Reed Ghazala and remained relatively unknown until YouTube arrived. Nowadays every soldering nerd is hacking old toys, turning them in noise synths. Atari Punk Console and Kraakdoos (STEIM) are well-known simple to build circuitries.
Soon after the circuit bend revival the modular synth revival started as a somewhat more elaborate version of the same skills. Koma Electronics, Gijs Gieskes and Bleep Labs are known artists/companies that released new inventions.
The same phenomenon happened with guitar stomp boxes. Zvex and Death by Audio pushed the sonic boundaries of this market and soon after hundreds os other boutique brands popped up.
The amount of DIY-kits for synth modules, noise circuitries and stomp boxes are infinite. From the most simple Fuzz Face up to the most fancy multifunctional delay pedal.
Computer Music
With the arrival of the personal computer a lot got visually locked up inside the box. Many musical programs are made. Many educational institutes offer a study in this direction, I hope it applies to you. I regard the computer a weak live performance tool in its appearance, so stay away from it as far as possible.
With the computer studies also the Arduino, Raspberry Pi and other microcontrollers are part of the curriculum. I did a one day course in this and I leave this job to the rest of the world, just like computer music. For sure interesting, but not for me as an artist.
This lack of interest in the possibilities of the computer causes that I do not have a lot to say on this chapter of the art of experimental musical instruments. Most of what I see are sensor-based interfaces and it’s a debate when a certain interface is actually a musical instrument or just the connection with the computer. But I’m overcritical and not the best judge on this.
Post 2000 Builders
As already mentioned, with the arrival of the internet obscurity in general evaporated. Basically, every artist can nowadays be found online. Though unstructured and not so well collectively documented, most builders that are active nowadays know each other. It’s a very informal scene where people share ideas.
This essay would become too long when I also would describe the inventions of my contemporary friends. I suggest you search their names on Google or YouTube or any social media site.
Here is a brief overview of recent builders/musicians that pop up in my mind right now (hoping I don’t forget some other good ones! For sure I’m overlooking some.):
Erik Alalooga, Paolo Angelli, Pierre Bastien, Pierre Berthet, Christian Blandoel, Fela Borbone, Till Boverman, Ken Butler, Ed Devane, Neil Feather, Folktek, Eli Gras, Andreas Oskar Hirsch, Gert-Jan Hobijn (Staalplaat), Kasper van Hoek, Geert Jonkers (Music Theater company BOT), Look Mom no Computer, Harm Goslink Kuiper, Radbout Mens, Neptune (noiserock band from Boston), New Complexity, Yuichi Onoue, Otamatone (CUBE toy), Bradford Reed, Tomoko Sauvage, João Fernando Arrais Serodio, Konrad Smoleński, Slumberland (Belgian band), Aart Strootman, Tangible Music Lab (Reactable), Thomas Truax, Wouter van Veldhoven, Diane Verdonk, Dewi de Vree, Vulpestruments, Vtol, Wessel Westerveld, Wintergatan, Cleaning Women, Peter Zegveld.
Organisations that are actively involved:
Sonoscopia, iii (The Hague), Radiona, Ljudmila, Music Hack Space London, Music Hack Space Copenhagen, Skrot Musiklabb, Befaco, CTM Berlin, Ars Electronica, Lab. 30, Center for New Music San Francisco, NIME, Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, Instruments Make Play.
I can recommend to follow Thiago Zando on Facebook or Instagram. He posts a lot of footage or current inventors. A great source!
Epilogue
One can never be complete in one historic overview article. For sure I forget names and professional geeks will probably miss their personal preferred gems, but at least I think this is a good enumeration for people unfamiliar with the topic. I challenge you to search for more info online about this art form.