Electronic Instruments in the Post-War Years

Beginning in the late 19th century with Cahills Telharmonium, the first boom period for electronic musical instruments had, by the 1930s, spawned a wide variety of novel instruments and technological breakthroughs. With the onset of the second world war at the end of that decade, however, progress on non-military technology all but stopped.

When the war ended in 1945, those in affected countries sought primarily to rebuild and re-establish a semblance of normal life. But this period was also noteworthy for a boom of both cultural and technological innovation – one that saw the birth of a new wave of electronic instruments.

Pre-war survivors
Not every instrument that emerged in the post-war years was a wholly new creation. Both the Theremin and Ondes Martenot had already gained popularity in the thirties, with each used in numerous popular movie soundtracks of the time. Robert Moog, who we’ll discover later, financed his time at university by designing and selling DIY kits for a portable Theremin.

The Mixtur-Trautonium
Another instrument with its roots in the 1930s was Friedrich Tratutwein’s Trautonium which was developed in collaboration with composer and music technologist Oskar Sala just until WWII broke out. Right after, Sala proceeded to add features to the already-complex instrument and turned it into the Mixtur-Trautonium, including an electronic percussion device, reverberator, and even tape-recording capabilities. In 1962, composer Oskar Sala famously used the Mixtur-Trautonium to create haunting electronic soundscapes for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1962 movie The Birds.

The Clavioline
In the late 1940s, Constant Martin developed his Clavioline in Versailles, France. Positioned under the keyboard of a piano, this predecessor to the analog synthesizer combined a knee-operated lever and a loudspeaker unit to give pianists an astonishing range of additional sounds and musical articulations. Though not so well known today, the Clavioline was a success at the time, manufactured under license in several countries and heard on classic tracks such as the Tornados’ “Telstar” and “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” by The Beatles.

Proto-sampling
Today, sampling – the process of creating music from snippets of existing audio – is commonplace. Following the emergence of magnetic tape as a recording standard, American inventor Harry Chamberlin devised an instrument, the M1001, that used a piano keyboard to trigger individual notes recorded to tape. Legend has it that Chamberlin’s salesman, Bill Fransen, took the tape-loop concept to the UK, convinced tape-head manufacturer Bradmatics that it was his own idea, and persuaded them to begin production of the now far-better-known Mellotron in 1963.

Drum machines
The first drum machine to appear on the market was the Wurlitzer Sideman from 1959. Like the Clavioline, this large wooden box was intended as an additional device, allowing musicians to accompany their primary instrument with pre-set drum patterns. With the later development of transistors came smaller devices like Rhythm Ace in 1967 and Rhythm King 1970. Drum machines are most often associated with the sounds of the 1980s and beyond, but they found favor with forward thinking musicians of the 60s too – Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Going On features numerous overdubs from the Rhythm King MRK-2.

Early computer music
In 1957, Bell Labs electrical engineer Max Mathews wrote MUSIC – one of the first pieces of software able to generate sounds on a digital computer, and the first to be widely adopted among other researchers and musicians. Of course, it wasn’t easy to create music using the computer technology of the time. The first composition created with MUSIC required a huge IBM 704 mainframe. Computing the 17-second performance in real time was impossible, so Mathews recorded a full hour of MUSIC’s output, recorded it to tape, and played it back at a faster speed.

The age of synthesis
Contrary to popular belief, by the time the first dedicated synthesizers arrived on the scene, drum machines, samplers, and even computers had already been used to make music. The basic principle of a subtractive analog synthesizer, like those designed by Robert Moog in the 1960s, is that players first create a waveform, and then shape its sound via filtering out undesired frequencies, hence "subtractive." The earliest synthesizers were bulky, costly, and complex, but successful nonetheless. This success encouraged both Moog and Don Buchla – a contemporary of Moog's with a different, yet similarly influential approach to synthesis – to create smaller, more portable instruments like the Minimoog and the Buchla Music Easel. Both of these synthesizers are regarded as classics today, and working original units command very high prices.

Peter Zinovieff
While household names like Moog and Buchla were ushering in a new era of electronic music in the US, Russian Peter Zinovieff founded Electronic Music Studios (EMS) in London and began work on what was to be the world’s first affordable, portable synthesizer, the VCS3 (pictured). Costing around £300 at the time, a VCS3 in good condition would today fetch upwards of £10,000. Zinovieff continued his work, creating the EMS Synthi 100 in 1971, which was purchased by the Studio for Electronic Music on the advice of Karlheinz Stockhausen himself. Turning his attention to still smaller and more affordable instruments, Zinovieff introduced the Synthi AKS in 1972, intended for use in school music classes.

Reverberating influences
Many of the instruments shown here are collector’s items – either vanishingly rare, or unattainably expensive – but their influence can be felt today in the music-making technology that we now take for granted.

Zinovieff, Moog, and Buchla–designed synthesizers, for example, remain popular today, they’ve also inspired a vast industry of other manufacturers, each of whom incorporate and iterate on key elements of those early instruments. And many of the principles established with Max Mathew’s MUSIC software are still adhered to by modern software – though, thankfully, you no longer need a super computer to run it.