In the two videos here, see Argen­tine lutenist Evan­geli­na Mas­car­di play pas­sion­ate ren­di­tions of J.S. Bach com­po­si­tions on the rich, res­o­nant Baroque lute. In Bach’s time, lutenists were some of the most wide­ly-admired instru­men­tal play­ers, and it’s easy to see why. The Baroque lute is not an easy instru­ment to play. Much less so were the the­o­r­bo and chi­tar­rone, instru­ments like it but with longer necks for longer bass strings. We see Mas­car­di con­cen­trate with utmost inten­si­ty on every note, a vir­tu­oso on an instru­ment that Bach him­self could not mas­ter.

Indeed, there has been sig­nif­i­cant debate over whether Bach actu­al­ly com­posed his four pieces for solo lute for that instru­ment and not anoth­er. For one thing, he seems to have had a “weak grasp” of the instru­ment, gui­tarist and lutenist Cameron O’Con­nor writes in an exam­i­na­tion of the evi­dence.

“The lute may have been an intim­i­dat­ing sub­ject even for Bach.” There are sev­er­al prob­lems with authen­ti­cat­ing exist­ing copies of the music, and “none of the pieces in staff nota­tion is playable on the stan­dard Baroque lute with­out some trans­po­si­tion of the bass­es and changes in chord posi­tions.”

Clas­si­cal gui­tarist Clive Tit­muss notes, “as stu­dent gui­tarists, we learned that J.S. Bach wrote four suites and a num­ber of mis­cel­la­neous pieces for the lute, now played on the gui­tar.” How­ev­er, recent schol­ar­ship seems to show that Bach, that most revered of Baroque com­posers, “did not write any music specif­i­cal­ly intend­ed for solo lute.” As O’Con­nor spec­u­lates, it was “the Laut­en­wer­ck, or lute harp­si­chord… which Bach most like­ly had in mind while com­pos­ing many of his ‘lute’ works.” You can see it in action here.

What does this debate add to our appre­ci­a­tion of Mas­cardi’s play­ing? Very lit­tle, per­haps. British lutenist and Bach schol­ar Nigel North writes in his Linn Records Bach on the Lute set, “Instead of labour­ing over per­pet­u­at­ing the idea that the so-called lute pieces of Bach are prop­er lute pieces I pre­fer to take the works for unac­com­pa­nied Vio­lin or Cel­lo and make them into new works for lute, keep­ing (as much as pos­si­ble) to the orig­i­nal text, musi­cal inten­tion, phras­ing and artic­u­la­tion, yet trans­form­ing them in a way par­tic­u­lar to the lute so that they are sat­is­fy­ing to play and to hear.”

A lutenist with the skill of North or Mas­car­di can trans­form solo Bach pieces — whether orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten for vio­lin, cel­lo, or laut­en­wer­ck — into the idiom of their cho­sen instru­ment. In Mas­cardi’s trans­for­ma­tions here, these works sound pos­i­tive­ly trans­port­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

Hear Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­tos Played on Orig­i­nal Baroque Instru­ments

Hear J.S. Bach’s Music Per­formed on the Laut­en­wer­ck, Bach’s Favorite Lost Baroque Instru­ment

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The ear­ly days of elec­tron­ic instru­ments lacked com­mon­ly accept­ed ideas about what an elec­tron­ic instru­ment was, much less how it should be used. No one asso­ci­at­ed elec­tron­ics with tech­no or new wave or hip hop or pop, giv­en that none of these exist­ed. Every sound made by exper­i­ments in syn­the­sis in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry was by its nature exper­i­men­tal, and most elec­tron­ic instru­ments were one of a kind. It did not even seem obvi­ous that elec­tron­ic instru­ments had to be machines that were pur­pose built for sound.

In 1930, at the very dawn of sound on film, Evge­ny Sholpo invent­ed the Var­io­phone — or “Auto­mat­ed Paper Sound with sound­tracks in both trans­ver­sal and inten­sive form.” It was, in sim­pler terms, a pho­to­elec­tric audio syn­the­siz­er that made use of a film pro­jec­tor and spin­ning card­board discs with sound waves cut into them in var­i­ous pat­terns. When ampli­fied, the device could turn the pat­terns into sounds. It also cre­at­ed “abstract spi­ral ani­ma­tion,” notes Boing Boing. Both “were way ahead of their time.”

If you’re think­ing such a machine might be used to make film sound­tracks, it was. But it was also “a con­tin­u­a­tion of research that Sholpo had been con­duct­ing since the 1910s,” the blog Beyond the Coda writes, “when he was work­ing on per­former­less music.”

Sholpo want­ed a device that would replace musi­cians and allow com­posers to turn com­plex musi­cal ideas into record­ed sounds them­selves. He was aid­ed in the endeav­or by Geor­gy Rim­sky-Kor­sakov (grand­son of Russ­ian com­pos­er Niko­lai Rim­sky-Kor­sakov), who helped him build the pro­to­type at Lenfilm Stu­dios in 1931.

The two pro­duced their first film sound­track for the pro­pa­gan­da film The Year 1905 in Bour­geoisie Satire, in 1931, and then the fol­low­ing year cre­at­ed “a syn­the­sized sound­track for A Sym­pho­ny of Peace and many oth­er sound­tracks for films and car­toons through­out the thir­ties,” notes 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music. The Var­io­phone was destroyed dur­ing the Siege of Leningrad, but Sholpo built two more, con­tin­u­ing to record sound­tracks through the for­ties. Unlike the first mono­phon­ic ana­logue syn­the­siz­ers built a cou­ple of decades lat­er, the Var­io­phone could cre­ate and repli­cate poly­phon­ic com­po­si­tions, since tones could be lay­ered atop each oth­er, as in mul­ti­track record­ing.

You can hear sev­er­al exam­ples of the Var­io­phone here, and see it synched to ani­ma­tion — both from its own sound waves and from hand-drawn films like “The Dance of the Crow,” below. What does it sound like? The tones and tim­bres vary some­what among record­ings. There’s clear­ly been some degra­da­tion in qual­i­ty over time, and the tech­nol­o­gy of record­ing sound on film was only in its infan­cy at the time, in any case. But, in cer­tain moments, the Var­io­phone can sound like the ear­ly Moog that Wendy Car­los used to syn­the­size clas­si­cal music and record film scores almost 40 years after Sholpo patent­ed his machine.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Monk Invent­ed the First Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment

Leon Theremin Adver­tis­es the First Com­mer­cial Pro­duc­tion Run of His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment (1930)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness