(b Würzburg, 11 Aug 1888; d Düsseldorf, 20 Dec 1956). German engineer and acoustician. He studied electrical engineering (1906–8) and law (1908–11), and received the doctorate from Karlsruhe (1921) before working in the radio industry. In 1930 he was appointed lecturer and in 1935 professor of musical acoustics at the Berlin Musikhochschule. His experiments in electronic music resulted in several instruments, including an amplified harpsichord (1936, in collaboration with Hanns Neupert), electronic bells and, most importantly, the Trautonium, developed in 1930 and used by, among others, Hindemith, Höffer, Genzmer and Julius Weismann, all of whom wrote concertos for it, Egk and Strauss. In the late 1940s Trautwein worked in Paris in aviation research; he then set up a school of composition in Düsseldorf which in 1950 became part of the Robert Schumann Conservatory. He published a trautonium method (Trautoniumschule, 1936) and many articles on acoustics and electronic music in technical and musical periodicals.
MGG1 (S. Goslich)
O. Sala: ‘Experimentelle und theoretische Grundlagen des Trautoniums’, Frequenz, ii (1948), 315–22; iii (1949), 13–19
W. Lottermoser: ‘Akustische Beurteilung elektronischer Musik-Instrumenten’, AMw, xii (1955), 249–79
O. Sala: ‘Subharmonische elektronische Klangsynthesen’, Klangstruktur der Musik, ed. F. Winckel (Berlin, 1955), 89–108
O. Sala: ‘Elektronische Klanggestaltung mit dem Mixtur-Trautonium’, Gravesano, ed. W. Meyer-Eppler (Mainz, 1955), 78–87
F. Winckel: ‘Friedrich Trautwein’, Musica, xi (1957), 93–4
F.K. Prieberg: Musica ex machina (Berlin, 1960), 223ff
CLIVE GREATED