A monophonic electronic instrument, the name of which is derived from that of its inventor, Friedrich Trautwein. It was first exhibited in Berlin in 1930, and a number of composers wrote for it: Hindemith learnt to play the instrument and in 1931 wrote a concertino for trautonium and string orchestra; other solo works with orchestra were composed by Genzmer (two concertos), Hermann Ambrosius and Julius Weismann, and Strauss, Egk, Josip Slavenski and Oskar Sala also used it. Sala (b Griez, Thuringia, 18 July 1910) became the trautonium’s sole virtuoso and, besides assisting Trautwein in the development of a domestic version (manufactured by Telefunken between 1932 and 1935), he constructed his own radio (1935) and concert (1938) trautoniums, and the Mixtur-Trautonium (1949–52), all of which had two fingerboards and featured sub-harmonic timbres. In 1952–3 Trautwein produced a simpler, two-manual version known as the Elektronische Monochord. The Mixtur-Trautonium was first used in compositions by Orff, Henze, Dessau, Jürg Baur, Sala and others, including a concerto by Genzmer (1952), but in 1958 it became the permanent mainstay of Sala’s electronic music studio (which produced the music for Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds, among others). A digital Mixtur-Trautonium was designed and built in the early 1980s as a series of student projects at the Fachhochschule der Deutschen Bundespost, Berlin.
The trautonium has a fingerboard consisting of a resistance wire, stretched over a metal rail, and coupled to an oscillator. The performer, on pressing the wire against the rail, completes the circuit and the oscillator is heard through the instrument’s loudspeaker. The position of the finger on the wire determines the resistance controlling the oscillator’s frequency and thus the pitch of the note heard. The three-octave range of the fingerboard can be transposed by means of a switch. A set of filters varies the timbre and non-harmonic partials (Hallformanten) can also be added by selective filtering to produce a distinctive and unusual timbre. Volume is controlled by a pedal.
F. Trautwein: Trautoniumschule (Mainz, 1936)
T.L. Rhea: The Evolution of Electronic Musical Instruments in the United States (diss., George Peabody College, 1972), 71–7; rev. as ‘The Trautonium’, Contemporary Keyboard, v/4 (1979), 76 only; repr. in The Art of Electronic Music, ed. T. Darter and G. Armbruster (New York, 1984), 39–40
O. Sala: ‘50 Jahre Trautonium’, Für Augen and Ohren (Berlin, 1980), 78–82 [festival programme book]
K. Ebbeke: ‘Paul Hindemith und das Trautonium’, Hindemith-Jb, xi (1983), 77–113
O. Sala: ‘My Fascinating Instrument’, Neue Musiktechnologie: Osnabrück 1991, 75–93
O. Sala: disc notes, Subharmonische Mixturen, Erdenklang 70962 (1997) [in Ger. and Eng.]
RICHARD ORTON/HUGH DAVIES