This page is maintained by Chris Rainier, a lapsteel player/guitarist, Trautonium player, composer and instrument-builder based in Melbourne, Australia. Between 2004 and 2006 he built a replica of an original valve Trautonium, based on a wealth of material sourced from the 1930's.
This page is a work in progress - at the moment I can only provide recordings of Oskar Sala's work, but by the end of the year I hope to have many recordings of my own machine.
THE TRAUTONIUM - WHAT IS IT?
The Trautonium is a monophonic electronic musical instrument, and was invented ca. 1929 in Berlin by the electrical engineer Dr. Friedrich Trautwein. It was first exhibited in Germany in 1930, and became the first commercially produced electronic instrument (albeit short-lived) when it was manufactured and marketed by Telefunken between 1932 and 1935. A handful of examples of this instrument reside in a few European museums (apparently there is one in Australia!)
A number of composers wrote works for the instrument, including Paul Hindemith who also learnt to play the Trautonium. Hindemith composed (amongst other works) a 'Concertina for Trautonium and Orchestra' and several short trios for three Trautoniums. Other composers soon followed his lead - Richard Strauss, Werner Egk, Harald Genzmer (who wrote two concertos for both the early version of the instrument and the later Mixtur-Trautonium), Julius Weismann and most notably Oskar Sala.
OSKAR SALA
Sala became the leading virtuoso on the instrument, eventually taking over the development of the Trautonium. From the 1940's onward he produced his own variations on the original design - the the Concert-Trautonium, the Radio-Trautonium and finally the Mixtur-Trautonium (more about that later). Oskar Sala continued to work with the Trautonium until his death in 2002, producing film scores (most notably Hitchcock's 'The Birds'), music for television, and numerous works for solo Trautonium, chamber and orchestral works.
PERFORMANCE TECHNIQUE AND SOUND PRODUCTION
The original Trautonium had a fingerboard consisting of a resistance wire stretched over a metal rail marked with a chromatic scale, and coupled to a neon tube oscillator. The performer pressed the wire against the rail, thus completing the circuit, and the oscillator was then amplified via a loudspeaker. The position of the finger on the wire determined the resistance controlling the frequency and therefore controlled the pitch of the oscillator. Expressive playing was possible by gliding on the resistor wire or creating vibrato with small movements. The earliest version of the Trautonium had rudimentary tone controls.
EPILOGUE - TRAUTWEIN AND THE ELECTRONIC MONOCHORD
Trautwein produced his last instrument the 'Elektronische Monochord' in 1952. This instrument was commissioned by the electronic music studio of WDR Radio (Köln) in order to expand the resources available in its newly founded electronic music studios, which at the time consisted of recording equipment, a two-manual melochord, a sine-wave generator and a ring modulator.
The Monochord was basically a modified Concert-Trautonium - a monophonic variable pitch interval keyboard controlling a valve-based tone generator. The keyboard was pressure sensitive and allowed for dynamic variations of the envelope, and a foot pedal controlled the overall volume output. Interestingly enough, this instrument is where the worlds of Trautwein and a young Stockhausen collide, as Stockhausen used this very instrument in creating his first electronic studies in 1953.
FURTHER READING
http://www.metasonix.com/index.php?option=com_content&ta
sk=view&id=14&Itemid=31
(the only all-tube oscillator on the market, now sadly discontinued)
http://www.keyboardmuseum.com/ar/m/meta/paper.html
(scroll down to 'Building The All-Tube VCO')
http://www.ghostmoney.co.uk/tmain.html
http://www.trautonium.com
http://www.originaltonwest.de/sala.html
http://www.music.psu.edu/Faculty%20Pages/Ballora/INART55/tra
utonium.html
http://www.furious.com/Perfect/ohm/oskarsala.html
