Word: mixturtrautonium
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...Grand Music Hall of Basel, Switzerland one day last week sat two strange contraptions. One resembled a telephone switchboard with a set of loudspeakers attached. The other looked like a small spinet but was connected to two loudspeakers and a lute-shaped soundbox. The gadgets were known as the "Mixturtrautonium" and the "Ondes Martenot." Both produce more or less musical tones electronically, and they were to be featured soloists in a concert for the delegates to the first International Congress of Electronic Music and Musique Concr...
...strings through which runs a weak electric current. By shifting his fingers along the strings much like a violinist and by working switches and pedals, the player can-at least theoretically-produce notes and pre-set chords of every imaginable color, frequency and strength. But so far the Mixturtrautonium can be played only by Engineer Sala...
...builder, started off with the Ondes Martenot. With remarkable technique, she coaxed from the instrument a synthetic cascade of notes, often shrill, occasionally pleasant, accompanied by a wildly modernistic orchestral background. She got a big hand from the audience. After intermission, Oskar Sala sat down before his Mixturtrautonium. To a tape-recorded background of shrill whistles, gongs, rattles and electronic drum sounds, he compounded the cacophony with his wildly incoherent themes. A third of the audience left before the end; those who stayed filled the hall with whistles and catcalls. Said a critic the next day: "As long...
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