Werner Heider - Plakat @pelodelperro

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Plakat (poster), for orchestra (1974)

Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrucken
Werner Heider

We are living in a world of posters. Everywhere we go our attention is diverted through optical, verbal or acoustical means. Good posters have always attracted me I have a large collection myself. So the idea came about to compose a musical poster for orchestra. The following sentence is placed in front as a guide:

This piece is a poster,
A musical placard,
A notice, an advertisement,
A public announcement.
The composition canvasses for orchestra.

The one large poster consists of 13 small posters (notices, placards, announcements), which are all linked together. The whole orchestra is playing (tutti) for the most part, but with occasional smaller or larger groups. Single instruments rarely emerge in a soloistic character. The whole orchestra is meant to conjur up the effect of a poster. I intend to surprise, to arouse attention. A poster which, through its sinews of music, invites and compels. For, after all, this is a piece of musical propaganda for the orchestra.

With interruptions I worked on the score during a period of one and a half years, completing it on August 1, 1974. "Plakat" was written on behalf of the city of Bonn, and was played there, for the first time, in December 1974.

Art by Alan Fletcher

$Paul Hindemith - Slow Piece & Rondo Slow Piece & Rondo, for trautonium (Lost. Preserved in a reconstruction by Oskar Sala) (1935) I. Slow piece II. Rondo (2:39) Oskar Sala, trautonium The trautonium is a monophonic electronic musical instrument invented about 1929 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin at the Musikhochschules music and radio lab, the Rundfunkversuchstelle. Soon Oskar Sala joined him, continuing development until Salas death in 2002. Instead of a keyboard, its manual is made of a resistor wire over a metal plate, which is pressed to create a sound. Expressive playing was possible with this wire by gliding on it, creating vibrato with small movements. Volume was controlled by the pressure of the finger on the wire and board. The first Trautoniums were marketed by Telefunken from 1933-35 (200 were made). The sounds were at first produced by neon-tube relaxation oscillators (later, thyratrons, then transistors), which produced sawtooth-like waveforms. The pitch was determined by the amount of resistive wire chosen by the performer (allowing vibrato, quarter-tones, and portamento). The oscillator output was fed into two parallel resonant filter circuits. A footpedal controlled the volume ratio of the output of the two filters, which was sent to an amplifier. On 20 June 1930 Oskar Sala and Paul Hindemith gave a public performance at the Berliner Musikhochschule Hall called “Neue Musik Berlin 1930″ to introduce the Trautonium. Later, Oskar Sala toured Germany with the Trautonium; in 1931 he was the soloist in a performance of Hindemiths Concert for Trautonium with String Quartet. He also soloed in the debut of Hindemiths student Harald Genzmers “Concert for Trautonium and Orchestra”. Paul Hindemith wrote several short trios for three Trautoniums with three different tunings: bass, middle, and high voice. His student, Harald Genzmer, wrote two concertos with orchestra, one for the monophonic Trautonium and, later, one for Oskar Salas Mixtur-Trautonium. One of the first additions of Sala was to add a switch for changing the static tuning. Later he added a noise generator and an envelope generator (so called Schlagwerk), formant filter (several bandpass filters) and the subharmonic oscillators. These oscillators generate a main pitch and several harmonics, which are not multiples of the fundamental tone, but fractions of it. For any of the now two manuals, four of these waves can be mixed and the player can switch through these predefined settings. Thus, it was called the Mixtur-Trautonium. Oskar Sala composed music for industrial films, but the most famous was the bird noises for Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds. The Trautonium was also used in the Dresden première of Richard Strausss Japanese Festival Music in 1942 for emulating the gongs- and bells-parts and in the 1950s in Bayreuth for the Monsalvat bells in Wagners Parsifal. [wikipedia.org] Art by Aristarkh Lentulov$

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