Rhythmicon
Encyclopedia
Drum machine
A drum machine is an electronic musical instrument designed to imitate the sound of drums or other percussion instruments. They are used in a variety of musical genres, not just purely electronic music...
(or "rhythm machine," the original term for devices of the type).
Development
In 1930, the avant-garde American composer and musical theorist Henry CowellHenry Cowell
Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
commissioned Russian inventor Léon Theremin
Léon Theremin
Léon Theremin was a Russian and Soviet inventor. He is most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments. He is also the inventor of interlace, a technique of improving the picture quality of a video signal, widely used in video and television technology...
to create the remarkably innovative Rhythmicon. Cowell wanted an instrument with which to play compositions involving multiple rhythmic patterns impossible for one person to perform simultaneously on acoustic keyboard or percussion instruments. The invention, completed by Theremin in 1931, can produce up to sixteen different rhythms—a periodic base rhythm on a selected fundamental
Fundamental frequency
The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the fundamental and abbreviated f0, is defined as the lowest frequency of a periodic waveform. In terms of a superposition of sinusoids The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the fundamental and abbreviated f0, is defined as the...
pitch
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
and fifteen progressively more rapid rhythms, each associated with one of the ascending notes of the fundamental pitch's overtone series
Harmonic series (music)
Pitched musical instruments are often based on an approximate harmonic oscillator such as a string or a column of air, which oscillates at numerous frequencies simultaneously. At these resonant frequencies, waves travel in both directions along the string or air column, reinforcing and canceling...
. Like the overtone series itself, the rhythms follow an arithmetic progression, so that for every single beat of the fundamental, the first overtone
Overtone
An overtone is any frequency higher than the fundamental frequency of a sound. The fundamental and the overtones together are called partials. Harmonics are partials whose frequencies are whole number multiples of the fundamental These overlapping terms are variously used when discussing the...
(if played) beats twice, the second overtone beats three times, and so forth. Using the device's keyboard, each of the sixteen rhythms can be produced individually or in any combination. A seventeenth key permits optional syncopation
Syncopation
In music, syncopation includes a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected in that they deviate from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak but also powerful beats in a meter . These include a stress on a normally unstressed beat or a rest where one would normally be...
. The instrument produces its percussion-like sound using a system, proposed by Cowell, that involves light being passed through radially indexed holes in a series of spinning 'cogwheel' discs before arriving at electric photoreceptors.
Nicolas Slonimsky
Nicolas Slonimsky
Nicolas Slonimsky was a Russian born American composer, conductor, musician, music critic, lexicographer and author. He described himself as a "diaskeuast" ; "a reviser or interpolator."- Life :...
described its capabilities in 1933:
The rhythmicon can play triplets against quintuplets, or any other combination up to 16 notes in a group. The metrical index is associated ... with the corresponding frequence of vibrations.... Quintuplets are ... sounded on the fifth harmonic, nonuplets on the ninth harmonic, and so forth. A complete chord of sixteen notes presents sixteen rhythmical figures in sixteen harmonics within the range of four octaves. All sixteen notes coincide, with the beginning of each period, thus producing a synthetic harmonic series of tones.
Introduction
Cowell had planned to exhibit the rhythmicon in Europe. In October 1931, in a letter to Ives from Berlin, he said, "I have been composing and have finished the second movement of my work for the Rhythmicon with orchestra for Nicolas to use in Paris in February." Composer Charles IvesCharles Ives
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...
, Cowell's close friend, commissioned Theremin to build a second model of the Rhythmicon for use by Cowell and his associate, conductor Nicolas Slonimsky
Nicolas Slonimsky
Nicolas Slonimsky was a Russian born American composer, conductor, musician, music critic, lexicographer and author. He described himself as a "diaskeuast" ; "a reviser or interpolator."- Life :...
.
The Rhythmicon was publicly premiered January 19, 1932 by Cowell and fellow music educator and theorist Joseph Schillinger
Joseph Schillinger
Joseph Schillinger was a composer, music theorist, and composition teacher. He was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine and died in New York City.-Life and career:...
at the New School for Social Research
The New School
The New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...
in New York. Schillinger had known Theremin since the early 1920s and had a life long interest in technology and music.
The radically new instrument attracted considerable attention, and Cowell wrote a number of compositions for it, including Rhythmicana, 1931 (later renamed 'Concerto for Rhythmicon and Orchestra'), and Music for Violin and Rhythmicon (1932). Slonimsky said that Cowell's special piece Rhythmicana (presumably the one Cowell referred to in his letters to Ives) was completed too late to be used at the Paris concerts.
On May 15, 1932, a New Music Society concert in San Francisco included – along with the premiere of Xanadu, a new work by Mildred Couper
Mildred Couper
Mildred Couper , prominent American composer and pianist, was one of the first musicians to experiment with quarter-tone music. She was based in Santa Barbara, California, but her music and influence were felt around the world...
– a demonstration of Cowell's new instrument. According to some sources, the concert premiered Cowell's "Rhythmicana", in four movements with orchestra, and "Music for Violin and Rhythmicon". According to several others, the Rhythmicana concerto was not performed publicly until 1971, and it was played on a computer. (Cowell later used the same title, Rhythmicana, for a set of solo piano pieces he composed in 1938.)
Before long the shine wore off. In 1994, Slonimsky wrote:
Like many a futuristic contraption, the Rhythmicon was wonderful in every respect, except that it did not work. It was not until forty years later that an electronic instrument with similar specifications was constructed at Stanford University. It could do everything that Cowell and Theremin had wanted it to do and more, but it lacked the emotional quality essential to music. It sounded sterile, antiseptic, lifeless — like a robot with a synthetic voice.Cowell soon left the Rhythmicon behind to pursue other interests and it was all but forgotten for many years.
Later years
One of the original instruments built by Theremin wound up at Stanford University; the other stayed with Slonimsky, from whom it later passed to Schillinger and then the Smithsonian Institution. This latter instrument is operational; its sound has been described as "percussive, almost drum-like." Theremin later (in early 1960s) built a third, more compact model after his return to the Soviet Union toward the end of the 1930s. This version of the instrument is operational and now resides at the Theremin Center in Moscow.According to many unsubstantiated accounts, in the 1960s, innovative pop music producer Joe Meek
Joe Meek
Robert George "Joe" Meek was a pioneering English record producer and songwriter....
experimented with the instrument, though it seems very unlikely that he had access to any of the original three devices; similarly, a number of accounts claim, without substantiation, that the Rhythmicon may be heard in the soundtracks of several movies, including Dr. Strangelove.
More recently, composer Nick Didkovsky
Nick Didkovsky
Nick Didkovsky is a composer, guitarist, computer music programmer, and leader of the band Doctor Nerve. He is a former student of Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros and Gerald Shapiro....
designed and programmed a virtual Rhythmicon using Java Music Specification Language and JSyn.
Schillinger once calculated that it would take 455 days, 2 hours, and 30 minutes to play all the combinations available on the Rhythmicon, assuming an average duration of 10 seconds for each combination.
Further reading
- Hicks, Michael (2002). Henry Cowell, Bohemian. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-02751-5.
- Lichtenwanger, William (1986). The Music of Henry Cowell: A Descriptive Catalogue. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn College Institute for Studies in American Music. ISBN 0-914678-26-4.
- Nicolas SlonimskyNicolas SlonimskyNicolas Slonimsky was a Russian born American composer, conductor, musician, music critic, lexicographer and author. He described himself as a "diaskeuast" ; "a reviser or interpolator."- Life :...
, Electra Yourke, Perfect pitch: an autobiography. Schirmer Trade Books, 2002, 318 pp.
External links
- American Mavericks: The Online Rhythmicon (requires a plugin or Java applet)
- A Version of Theremin's Rhythmicon - (Program for Windows) (1 minute 50 seconds video of Andrej Smirnov demonstrating a Rhythmicon with keyboard and spinning discs at the Theremin Center, Moscow, 2005) (Flash needed) (YouTube copy of cyberorchestra.com's video showing Smirnov playing "the third version of Rhythmicom built by Leon Theremin at Moscow State Conservatory in early 1960-s")
- The Schillinger Society