The Ethereal Orchestra
André Coeuroy on Electric Music [1932]
This is a shorter than usual post, on André Coeuroy’s 1932 article ‘L'orchestre éthéré / The Ethereal Orchestra’ from La Revue Musicale [September-October, No. 129, p.161-165]. I wanted to highlight Coeuroy’s article as it contains perspectives commonly found in other writing in the 1930s concerning early electronic music instruments. The aim here is to underline how widespread some of the ideas were that I have been outlining in my recent posts; in terms of the limitations of performing existing music on new instruments, and the possibilities of new and future musics afforded by these devices.
André Coeuroy was the pseudonym of Jean Belime, a musicologist, critic and translator. He was the editor-in-chief of La Revue musicale from 1920-37, and a music critic for several newspapers (i.e. Ère Nouvelle (1920–1925), Paris-Midi (1925–1939) and Gringoire (1927–1939)). He wrote on jazz and many other musical topics, supported modern French music and composers (e.g. Le Six [Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre], Edgard Varèse and the Jeune France group [established by Yves Baudrier, Olivier Messiaen, André Jolivet and Daniel-Lesur]). He wrote on technological subjects including the phonograph, radio and, in this article, electric musical instruments. By the late 1930s he moved firmly towards right-wing politics and overt French nationalism, and was a collaborator espousing right-wing views during WW2. From 1943 he contributed to Je suis partout, an anti-semitic, fascist and collaborationist newspaper.
In the 1932 article ‘L'orchestre éthéré’ Coeuroy begins by looking back over the previous 4 or 5 years, stating
The music of ethereal waves has captivated the crowds, always eager for miracles. It has interested scholars. It has piqued the curiosity of musicians. It has already inspired composers: [Ernest] Fromaigeat composed Variations caractéristiques (Characteristic Variations) for dynaphone. Last year, Arthur Honegger performed a ballet, Roses en Métal (Metal Roses) at the Petite Scène, whose score was written for the same instrument.
He then moves on to discuss and critique the Theremin, Maurice Martenot’s ‘ondes musicales’ instrument, and then René Bertrand’s Dynaphone. On these instruments he indicates - from a French perspective - how
All devices producing ethereal waves are designed to use Hertzian waves to produce sounds. This is called l’éthérophonie (etherophony), or music produced from the ether. This l’éthérophonie has been around for about fifteen years. The first tests date back to 1917. They were carried out at the Eiffel Tower laboratory, under the direction of the vice-president of the Radio Club de France. From that time on, engineers, anticipating the musical benefits that could be derived from radio-electric beat frequencies, had imagined making marks corresponding to the various notes of the scale on the dial of the tuning capacitor. They had already succeeded in playing fairly simple melodies.
On the Theremin he writes
Around the same time, the Russian Theremin presented a device that excited the enthusiasm of listeners, first in Russia, then in Central European countries, Germany, France, and America. The Russian's invention had a great impact because the undulating movement of the hands played a central and supposedly magical role. A specialist described the device and its operation as follows: In front of a box of special valves equipped with a thin antenna, the inventor, by moving his right hand away or closer, created sounds, the intensity and timbre of which, using a raised or lowered circular antenna, he modified at will, thus obtaining sounds of incomparable purity, power and, at will, finesse …
A very interesting scientific development, the Theremin apparatus was actually much less satisfactory for the musician. It required an extraordinary delicacy of hearing from the person handling it, because the notes could only be produced by guesswork, depending on the distance of the right hand from the vertical antenna. Hence the painful fumbling, an uncertainty and a slowness in the execution which meant that, at least in France, the world of composers, present at the two performances which took place at the Salle Gaveau and at the Opera at the end of 1927, only gave the Russian's invention a distracted listen.
He then assesses the work of Maurice Martenot, and Coeuroy’s criticism of Martenot’s choice of classical repertoire is something we also find aimed at Thereminists of the time by many other writers.
Now, the problem of accuracy and speed of performance preoccupied a young French music professor, Maurice Martenot, who adopted the principle of a device patented in 1922 by another French engineer, Hugonniot [Charles–Emile Hugoniot], who had recently died. The primitive device had essentially the same appearance as Theremin's … and it was also by moving the right hand closer to it that the performer produced the sounds, which became higher-pitched the closer the hand was to the box. A copper wire acted as a capacitor … On the floor, along a graduated ruler, a cursor moved at the same time as the wire lengthened or shortened: thus appeared the reference point [for pitch] that was missing from the Russian's device. The intensity of the sound was adjusted by a lever adapted to a small nearby device …
… while Thérémin was first and foremost an engineer and a musician to boot, Martenot was first and foremost a musician … For as a respectful admirer of the teaching of the Conservatoire, he immediately made his device - whose theoretical possibilities are unlimited - an emulator of the perfect music teacher. His whole ideal is to imitate the violin, the cello or the human voice in tunes and melodies tested by the centuries … Here we grasp the duel between artistic tradition and scientific innovation: the former immediately seeks to devour the latter. This is what happened to cinema, which initially sought only to imitate the theater and struggled to free itself from this bondage. This is what happened again to the phonograph and radio, whose great preoccupation is to give, as the brochures say, the illusion of reality, and thus resolutely turn their backs on their true ideal, which should be nothing more than the transposition of sounds onto a new plane.
Coeuroy then argued ‘[a] radio-electric musical instrument will only have true aesthetic interest for the orchestra if it seeks to reveal its own personality, to highlight its specific qualities, to create, as the poet says, a new thrill.’ He suggests that René Bertrand’s Dynaphone was the instrument best positioned to undertake this musical-technical task.
The Dynaphone … featured a five-octave keyboard that, depending on the setting, could be placed anywhere in the eight octaves, encompassing almost all audible sounds. A lever … moved in front of a dial, visually indicated the position to be taken for a desired pitch/note. Various controls could modify the intensity and give different sounds different timbres, allowing the sound to be muted at will and to obtain glissando or staccato, along with vibrato …
One of the advances made by the Dynaphone … lay in its ability to produce something other than a monody, a string of notes … it could produce, at will, along with the base note, its octave and fifth … From then on, the production of chords appeared possible with devices of this type, making it conceivable, at least in theory, that it could replace an entire orchestra.
Beyond these features Coeuroy indicated that unlike the Theremin and Martenot instruments, the Dynaphone was ‘aimed much less at imitating already known timbres’. He argues that this enabled Fromaigeat (using 6 Dynaphones in the Variations caractéristiques) and Honegger (using 3 in Roses en Métal) to achieve unexpected, extraordinary and highly interesting effects; ‘[f]ar from wanting to return lethargic music to the rut of traditional music, they endeavored to make it follow its own path, and these first steps were giant leaps.’
After noting other new electric instruments [the Coupleux-Givelet electric organ, Jörg Mager's Sphaerophon , the Hellertion, and Trautwein's Trautonium], Coeuroy imagines an exchange with a critic wary of these new instruments.
Yes, says the lover of sensual pleasure, but your instruments are mechanical devices that freeze the sound and remove its peachy skin. May it please Saint Cecilia that they never replace our good old instruments which, at least, sir, have heart.
In reply Coeuroy suggests he would counter this hesitancy by arguing
You will have it, your heart and your sensual pleasure, otherwise, I grant you, there is no orchestra worth listening to. These new instruments are still frozen because the radioelectric beats are too uniform. Let this uniformity be broken, and you will find your heart and soul again.
Finally, Coeuroy notes how electric musical instruments are still in their infancy, and music made with electricity is just finding its feet, form and expressive purpose. Rather than creating synthetic, inhuman music, composers and musicians will eventually learn how to utilise - or subjugate - these instruments for the expression of the full range of human emotions.
Electric music has so far played only in black and white. It is searching for its colors and its sensuality. It is about to find them; and in the transformed orchestra, the heart, which always has the last word, will finally subjugate the omnipotent machine.
Looking further into André Coeuroy’s writing at the time, I came across an intriguing discussion of his 1928 book Panorama de la musique contemporaine. Peter Hugh Reed in an article ‘This Thing Called Recorded Music’ in The Phonograph Monthly Review [July 1930, Vol. IV, No. 10] discusses recent French books on the topic, and it appears that Coeuroy spends time discussing machines and noise in the future of music, in a manner similar to Carole-Bérard, Carlos Chavez, Edgard Varèse, John Cage and others.
Critical interest in phonographic music in France is further attested to by the simultaneous publication of three serious books on the gramophone: by such eminent musicographers and critics as Andre Coeuroy, Boris de Schloezer and Charles Wolff … In his survey, Panorama de la musique contemporaine, M. Coeuroy has devoted considerable space to mechanical music. He refers to the Africans 'who are “stylists in noises,” to the Italian harmonizers of noises, to Mozart’s composition for the mechanical organ, to Weber's rondo of 1811 for the harmonichord. Strawinsky uses a handorgan in Petrouchka, Pleyela [piano player] rolls accompany Gremillon’s film, “Tour of the Deep,” Jaubert the Frenchman invents the “prodigious magician,” the Germans, Hindemith, Toch and Munich, write for the mechanical piano. Coeuroy … indicates that mechanical music and mechanical entertainment have an old history and a long future. This future is extended by the talking film, whose future is the future of noise, its control and its fashioning.
I aim to look into this further when I have a copy of the book …