The Electronic Century Part I: Beginnings

Feb 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Joel Chadabe

The early years of electronic musical instruments set the tone for a century.

Commercial Success

Inventor Laurens Hammond designed and manufactured a variety of instruments: clocks, an automatic shuffling bridge table, and eyeglasses for viewing 3-D film. Then, in 1933, he bought a used piano and began to design an electronic organ.

Unlike Theremin, Trautwein, and Martenot—and the other electronic-instrument inventors who were motivated by the adventure of invention and a fascination with discovering new ways to make music—Hammond was motivated by profit through sales. His goal was to sell organs to a mass market. Like most businesspeople with a similar goal, he approached the problems of design, manufacture, marketing, and sales with a cool-headed eye toward reducing expenses and increasing revenue.

The designs for his organs reflected economy in manufacture. For example, after analyzing concave pedalboards in other organs, Hammond leveled the pedalboard in his design and omitted the pedals that were played the least often. The sounds in his organ were generated by additive-synthesis tonewheels that were refinements of the mechanisms that Cahill had used in the Telharmonium.

The Model A organ appeared in June 1935. Hammond's marketing was pervasive and intense, initially aimed at churches throughout the country. But his organ's distinctive sound was soon found to have just the right quality for jazz and blues—and eventually for rock. Many different models followed, with assorted variations and improvements, to satisfy customers' varied needs. The Hammond B-3, first introduced in 1936, has achieved legendary status in the music world. Especially when paired with a Leslie rotary speaker, the B-3 has brought tears of joy to the eyes of many musicians.

Hammond's organ was a major success. It was everywhere. And it demonstrated the existence of a mass market for electronic instruments. But it was limited in the variety of sounds it could produce. From the perspective of a musical-instrument inventor, there was a lot of work to be done.

The Electronic Sackbut

During World War II, Hugh Le Caine worked on microwave transmission at the Canadian National Research Council in Ottawa. In a more relaxed period following the war, he pursued a secret life. Working at home in the evenings, he was building an electronic musical instrument.

In 1948, Le Caine finished a working prototype of what he called the "Electronic Sackbut," a precursor to the voltage-controlled synthesizers to come in the 1960s (see Fig. 3). The Sackbut was capable of great performance nuance, with keys that were sensitive to sideways pressure to change pitch. One note could slide into another, vibrato could be performed by wiggling a finger side to side, or notes could be bent as far as an octave away from the basic pitch. Vertical pressure on a key controlled volume such that gradual attacks could be made. Even more interesting, Le Caine added mechanisms that introduced irregularities into the tones, such as breath sounds, buzzing, or raspiness, to enhance what he called the "monotonous purity" of electronic tones.

Following a public presentation of the Sackbut and many lectures and demonstrations, Canada's National Research Council established a studio for Le Caine. The studio enabled him to develop electronic musical instruments for manufacture by Canadian companies. This was an affirmation that an electronic-music market truly existed and that this market was beginning to open up.

The RCA Synthesizer

The next major electronic musical device to come along focused on the ability to make any sound. RCA's concept was to develop an instrument that could substitute for a studio orchestra. The RCA Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer was a step in that direction, built by Harry Olson and Herbert Belar at RCA's Sarnoff Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, and finished in 1957.

The Mark II contained 750 vacuum tubes. It covered an entire wall of a room, horizontally and vertically. It was, in fact, a punched-paper-tape reader that controlled an analog synthesizer. Information was input by using a typewriterlike device to punch holes in a paper roll. The paper roll was then passed through a reader and read by contacts between metal brushes that touched through the holes, thereby closing switches and causing the appropriate machine processes to start or stop.

Considering the time at which it was built, the Mark II was powerful. But its user interface was a nightmare. In fact, it was so difficult to operate that it had only one primary user. Acquired by the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959, it was used almost exclusively by Milton Babbitt, composer and professor at Princeton University (see Fig. 4). (Babbitt later remarked, "I've got the patience of Job.") Although the Mark II was seriously damaged by thieves who broke into the studio in 1976, it still exists in the Columbia University Computer Music Center.

The Early Days

In summary, the history of electronic music during the first part of the 20th century comprises the development of the early instruments more than the evolution of electronic musical art. These instruments, by and large, were not associated with innovative musical ideas. Rather, they were continuations of a long lineage of instrument invention, and they were generally intended for playing the same music that was played on traditional instruments. Cahill, for example, had set out to provide mass distribution of music that would include many musical styles, from Rossini overtures to popular music to church hymns.

Most of the early instruments, including the Telharmonium, did not offer composers a lot of new musical possibilities. They did offer some novel sounds, even if they were often difficult to play, and a few avant garde composers experimented with them. Paul Hindemith, for example, composed a few pieces for the Trautonium. Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen, among other composers, had a passing interest in the Ondes Martenot-in fact, it's worth noting that the Ondes Martenot is still occasionally used by contemporary composers. Le Caine himself experimented with music for the Sackbut, but his hit number was a performance of the opening to Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." The sounds of the RCA Mark II were documented on a demo LP made by RCA engineers, but the selections, which included Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," were not exactly musically innovative.

The RCA Mark II was exceptional in that it did offer new musical possibilities. It offered precision of control, the possibility for substantial complexity in rhythm and texture, and a large palette of electronic sounds. These were the qualities that Milton Babbitt found important, and Babbitt's "Philomel" (1963) and "Vision and Prayer" (1964), both for soprano and taped electronic sounds made with the RCA Mark II, are probably the only masterworks created with the early instruments.

In one way or another, all of the early instruments foreshadowed the future. Cahill's business plan for the Telharmonium presaged Muzak. The Trautonium and Ondes Martenot laid the foundations for pitch bending and microtonality. The Electronic Sackbut was the forerunner of the voltage-controlled synthesizer, and the RCA Mark II Synthesizer, with its punched-paper-tape reader, prefigured the software sequencers of the MIDI age.

There was one exception: the theremin. Among the entire first group of electronic musical instruments, the theremin alone remains viable today in its original form. It has been used in music by the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, and many others, and its sound has provided an eerie background to films by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock. It is now lighter and less expensive than it was at the start, and its mechanisms have otherwise been improved by modern technology. But it does today exactly what it did when Theremin played it in New York in 1927.

Joel Chadabe, composer and author of Electric Sound, is president of the Electronic Music Foundation. He can be reached at chadabe@emf.org.

For Your Reading and Viewing Pleasure

There are several excellent resources that you should consider if you'd like more information on the first era of electronic music technology. Here are some book recommendations:

Electric Sound (Prentice Hall, 1996), by Joel Chadabe, discusses developments throughout the 20th century, with excellent coverage of the first 50 years.

Magic Music from the Telharmonium (Scarecrow Press, 1995), by Reynold Weidenaar, is the most thorough book ever published on this amazing instrument; check out the video as well.

Sackbut Blues (Canadian National Museum of Science and Technology, 1989), by Gayle Young, chronicles the life and work of Hugh Le Caine, a fascinating innovator.

To supplement your reading, here are a few recommended recordings:

The Art of the Theremin (Delos) features Clara Rockmore playing transcriptions of music by Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saens, Stravinsky, and others.

Oskar Sala: Subharmonische Mixturen (Erdenklang) includes compositions for the Trautonium by several composers, including Paul Hindemith.

Les Ondes Musicales (SNE) features Genevieve Grenier performing Debussy, Ravel, Faure, Gaubert, and Satie on the Ondes Martenot.

Milton Babbitt (CRI) includes the seminal work "Vision and Prayer," featuring Bethany Beardslee, soprano, and electronic sounds from the RCA Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer.

We also recommend this videotape:

Clara Rockmore: The Greatest Theremin Virtuosa (Big Briar), produced by Robert Moog and Big Briar, features theremin performances and demonstrations by Clara Rockmore in an informal conversational environment with Robert Moog and Tom Rhea.

These and other interesting items are available from CDeMUSIC at www.cdemusic.org.

The Electronic Century, Continued

Part II: Tales of the Tape

Part III: Computers and Analog Synthesizers

Part IV: The Seeds of the Future