In classical music, the names we remember are typically of those who compose. Names of performers and conductors also persist in cultural memory. But there is another way in which musical innovators can reach posterity: invent, or come up with the idea for, a new musical instrument. From instruments played with water to early electronic devices promoted by the Nazis, this feature looks at the surprising history of eponymous instrumental creations.
Composing instruments?
Straining to close the gap between their sonic imaginings and the limits of their medium, composers themselves have prompted some famous instrumental namesakes. Seeking to evoke the sound of ancient Nordic horns for his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner conceived of a brass instrument filling a timbral mid-point between the horn and trombone, most likely while visiting the workshop of Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax in 1853 (more on him later).
But it wasn’t until 1875 that what is now known as the Wagner Tuba made its appearance in the Ring’s first full performance. Despite its 22-year gestation, the Wagner Tuba went on to have an illustrious career in the compositions of Bruckner, Stravinsky, Strauss, Bartók and Schoenberg.
Romanticism prompted another innovation of sorts in the ‘Mahler Hammer’. Less an instrumental creation than a direction for percussionists, this came about to fill the demands of the composer’s Sixth “Tragic” Symphony. Intending to signify “mighty blows of fate”, Mahler called for a sound that was “like the fall of an axe.”
Percussionists have responded to this in various ways, from striking a bass drum with a sledgehammer to crashing a mallet onto a wooden surface, meaning that the Mahler Hammer might more accurately denote a booming, ominous sound rather than a specific instrument.
Attack of the phones
The mid-19th to the early-20th centuries saw an astonishing rate of innovation. While Johannes Kuhlo’s late-19th-century kuhlohorn didn’t make it far beyond its intended use as a variation on the flugelhorn for church choir ensembles, Heinrich Band’s bandoneon, developed in Germany in the 1840s, greatly impacted the music of South America, particularly tango. Operated with bellows and buttons like a concertina (as opposed to keys, like an accordion), it was popularised by the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, who composed a concerto for it.
However, far more pervasive in the 1800s scramble for new instruments was the naming convention, ‘second name + phone’. Adolphe Sax’s saxhorns may have provided inspiration for Wagner’s Tuba, but his most famous instrument impacted music in ways he could not have foreseen. Sax conceived of a family of instruments combining the qualities of woodwind and brass, originating from an earlier instrument called the ophicleide.
What Sax produced in 1840 was originally called a ‘bass ophicleide’, and it wasn’t until Berlioz dubbed it a saxophone in 1842 that its name stuck. Premiered in an 1844 opera by Jean-Georges Kastner, saxophones were memorably utilised in works such as Bizet’s L’Arlésienne, Ravel’s Boléro and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It was from around the time of Gershwin’s piece that the instrument took on a new life in the explosion of jazz.
Also inventing the sax-tuba and saxo-tromba, Sax met with misfortune later in life, becoming mired in costly court cases with competing instrument makers over patents. One of these was regarding Pierre Auguste Sarrus’ sarrusophone, a brass instrument played with a double reed. Sarrus himself was a military bandmaster, but it was the businessman Pierre Louis Gautrot, who patented the sarrusophone, whom Sax unsuccessfully sued due to its likeness to the saxophone.
It is thought that Sax got his own back by using his influence in the world of military bands to prejudice potential buyers against the sarrusophone, meaning that it never achieved widespread use. However, Gounod composed a sarrusophone sextet to mark its 1867 exhibition, and the contrabass version was used by Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Delius and Lili Boulanger. Stravinsky and Percy Grainger are known to have composed for other types of sarrusophone. (In 1911, Friedrich Roth produced something very similar, the rothphone, although it never troubled the oboes and bassoons which it was intended to replace.)
Military music was a catalyst for instrument creation in the 1800s, and it was John Philip Sousa, a composer of marches born forty years to the day after Adolphe Sax, who dreamt up the sousaphone. A relative of the tuba, it was designed to fit around the player’s body to be easy to play while marching, and, with its high, forward-facing bell, to project its sound over the band. Both the JW Pepper and CG Conn companies claimed to produce the original sousaphone – it is now thought that Conn’s were the most popular, Pepper’s the first. It has since enjoyed a successful career both in marching bands and in jazz ensembles.
The time of the phones is filled with a host of more obscure musical inventions. François Sudre’s 1892 sudrophone, a relative of the saxhorn that contained a vibrating silk membrane that could be deployed to alter the instrument’s timbre, never achieved its intended use as the economical alternative to employing more instrumentalists. Wilhelm Heckel’s 1904 heckelphone, built in response to Wagner’s desire to blend oboe and alphorn textures, made its only notable appearances in works by Hindemith and Strauss.
Henry Charles Marx dubbed his keyed zither a marxophone in 1912, but special mention should go to the waterphone, which both uses water to make its sound and was patented by Richard Waters in 1975. Composed of a steel bowl with vertical bronze rods arranged around its edge, its etheric tone is produced by the movement of water in the bowl as its rods are struck or bowed, and it has been employed by composers Tan Dun and Sofia Gubaidulina.
Electric dreams
As the 20th century progressed, innovators turned to the acoustic possibilities of electricity. In the Soviet Union, Lev Sergeyevich Termen – better known as Leon Theremin – presented his new instrument to Lenin in 1922. With its pitch controlled by the movement of the performer’s hand in relation to an antenna, the theremin’s ghostly wail was first deployed orchestrally in Pashchenko’s Symphonic Mystery (1924), and later by Grainger, Martinů, Schnittke and Henry Cowell. Its ‘spooky’ glissando was popularly encountered on science fiction film soundtracks and not on the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations (that was a Tannerin or ‘Electro-Theremin’).
In hot pursuit was Maurice Martenot, a cellist inspired by the sounds he heard in the inadvertent overlaps of tones on radio oscillators. Originally called the ‘ondes musicales’, his ondes Martenot is akin to the theremin in its swooping glissandi, made in this case by the movement of the player’s finger on a ribbon controller (and a keyboard in some cases). Like the theremin, it has been evocatively employed on film soundtracks (including Lawrence of Arabia and Amelie), but it was first used orchestrally in Dimitrios Levidis’s Poème symphonique (1928).
Milhaud, Honegger and Samuel Barber were enthusiastic about the ondes Martenot, and Pierre Boulez was an early specialist. In the 1930s, Varèse rescored the theremin parts for Ecuatorial for ondes Martenot, and Messiaen famously put it to use in works including Turangalîla-Symphonie. Martenot was an experimenter at heart, developing innovative amplification systems, including one in which the instrument’s loudspeaker was replaced by a gong, and another which contained vibrating sympathetic strings.
Progressing out of the technology of the theremin and ondes martenot, Friederich Trautwein’s trautonium created its frosty tones through the movement of the performer’s fingers over a metal rail holding a resistance wire. Exhibited in Berlin in 1930, Hindemith learned to play the instrument and wasted no time in writing a concertino for it (it was also used by Strauss and Carl Orff).
The instrument’s only ever virtuoso, however, was Oskar Sala, who had assisted Trautwein in producing different versions. As a German invention, it was advocated for by Nazi Party officials, one of whom organised a public presentation to Joseph Goebbels. The propagandist’s response to this new sound was, “I like it, carry on”, according to Sala, who toured Germany and occupied territories performing the instrument before being conscripted in 1944. After the war, Sala set up a workshop in which he created a polyphonic trautonium, producing film soundtracks and other commissions. A notable filmic use of the instrument is in the avian screams of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
In 1946, Harry Chamberlin invented a precursor to a sampler. His chamberlin keyboard used electromagnetic tape to replay the sound of existing instruments and was copied by the producers of the mellotron (who eventually paid him compensation). Perceptions of electronic sound in the later 20th century, however, are dominated by the synthesiser, a family of instruments which create sounds by combining waveforms.
While the inventions of Robert Moog sit within this family, some consider his instruments a class of their own due to their innovative incorporation of elements such as voltage-controlled oscillators, which use variations in electrical charge to give hitherto unprecedented tonal control. Moog put himself through college selling his own theremin kits, going on to work with the composer Herb Deutsch to create a monophonic synthesiser, the first to use Vladimir Ussachevsky’s envelope generator, which was able to alter timbre over stretches of time.
Moog’s instrument was taken overground by Wendy Carlos’ LP Switched-On Bach (1968). The hugely successful album, comprised purely of Carlos’s interpretations of Bach pieces on a Moog synth, led to the instrument being dubbed “the Steinway of the future”. Around this time, it helped define the classical-inspired explorations of the progressive rock movement.
From the Moog to the marxophone, the variance in eponymous instruments’ cultural impact is palpable. Their shared history, however, indicates how the path to musical posterity isn’t just about how you arrange or perform sound: it’s how you make it.
