Ru
EnD. Zabroda
The history of the Trautonium: towards contemporary media
The article examines the history of the Trautonium, one of the first electronic musical instruments, created in Germany in 1930 by Friedrich Trautwein with the participation of Paul Hindemith. For the first time in Russian musicology, the Trautonium is examined as a narrative of cultural dynamics, making it possible to trace the mechanisms behind the transformation of the status of a new musical instrument depending on the political and aesthetic context of the country. Based on an analysis of three stages of its existence (its emergence during the Weimar period, its appropriation by the Nazi regime, and its post-war revival in the avant-garde and film industry), the author demonstrates how the instrument consistently changed its meaning – from a symbol of technological optimism and a project for the democratization of musicmaking, to an instrument of propaganda embodying the aesthetics of “steel romanticism”, and further to a forerunner of contemporary approaches in sound design and multimedia composition. Special attention is given to the role of Oskar Sala and Harald Genzmer in shaping the concert repertoire of the instrument under the Third Reich, as well as to Sala’s collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in creating the soundtrack for the film The Birds (1963), which took the Trautonium beyond the boundaries of academic music into the realm of sound design. The instrument becomes in the post-war period a forerunner of contemporary approaches in sound design and multimedia composition, and in the 21st century it acquires a new interpretation in contemporary pop music and theatrical productions. On this basis, the article concludes that the Trautonium’s value for contemporary musicology lies in the inexhaustibility of interpretations of the instrument’s capabilities, which allows the Trautonium to be viewed not as a completed phenomenon of the historical past, but as the more actual problem addressed to the today audiences of multimedia compositions.
Key words
history of musical instruments, Trautonium, electronic music, multimedia musical composition, sound design, Friedrich Trautwein, Paul Hindemith, Oskar Sala, Harald Genzmer.
For citation
Zabroda D. The history of the Trautonium: towards contemporary media. In: South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2026. No. 3. Pp. 97–104.
