Inventive composers... vivid imaginations and practical solutions
Composers are, by their very nature, a creative bunch. They bring into being something new where it didn’t exist before. Rather like an inventor, arguably. And while revolutionising the symphony or wowing the world as a virtuoso pianist-composer would be achievement enough for most people, some composers didn’t get that memo. When the final double bar line had been written, they turned their vivid imaginations to solving a whole host of practical problems. Whether as enthusiastic amateurs or prolific professionals, bank-rolling philanthropists or supportive family members, composers have made surprising contributions to the world of inventions.
Inventive composers: Beethoven and bone conduction
That Beethoven went deaf has become part of his personal mythology, most often told as a tale of triumph over adversity. The reality is, of course, far more nuanced – and through living with deafness, Beethoven inadvertently found himself exploring and even, arguably, inventing the latest hearing technology. At one point, he drew on the expertise of his friend Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, inventor of the metronome, who designed him ear trumpets. As Robin Wallace explains in his book Hearing Beethoven, these were lengths of tubing with an expanding hollow end inserted into the ear. Sometimes these were linked to a resonating device to pick up sound, which meant they worked like hearing aids.
There’s also speculation that Beethoven found a way to still hear his music being played, via vibrations passing through a wooden stick that he placed in his mouth and on the piano. This used the concept of bone conduction, which was first described by an Italian physicist, Girolamo Cardano, in the 16th century. It’s unclear if Beethoven was familiar with Cardano’s work, or if he came to his technique independently. Either way, in the last few decades, bone conduction hearing devices have become a mainstream option available to people with certain types of hearing loss, while bone conduction headphones are widely available for everyone.
Inventive composers: Borodin the chemist
One of the major Russian nationalist composers, Alexander Borodin was also, by profession, a medical doctor and a chemist (and an advocate for the higher education of women in Russia). In 1864, he was appointed chair and professor of chemistry at Saint Petersburg’s Medical-Surgical Academy, where he pursued research into aldehydes – a class of organic compounds. Even if he’s much better known for his music nowadays, Borodin contributed to the advancement of scientific research when he discovered the Aldol reaction in 1869, independently from a French chemist who found it around the same time. His work on the synthesis of methyl bromide into silver acetate was later developed and patented in the 1930s and is known as the Hunsdiecker or Hunsdiecker-Borodin reaction. Not quite as catchy as his Polovtsian Dances, but notable nonetheless.
Inventive composers: Elgar and the Sulphuretted Hydrogen Machine
Borodin wasn’t the only composer fascinated by chemistry. Elgar also dabbled in the science, albeit as a keen amateur. He loved to spend hours working on his projects in, first, his basement laboratory and, later, his shed, named The Ark. ‘I am resuming chemistry & made soap yesterday between fits of scoring (not scouring!) the symphony,’ he wrote to a friend. Elgar’s experiments didn’t always go to plan, and on one notable occasion he made a ‘phosphoric concoction’ that accidentally blew up a water butt. Far more successful was his device for synthesising hydrogen sulfide, the Sulpheretted Hydrogen Machine, which even went on to be patented and manufactured as the Elgar S.H. Apparatus – briefly at least. In a letter to August Jaeger in 1908, he was self-deprecating about the news. ‘I will not offer to send you my invention – you would soon tire of it – although a nice toy.’
Inventive composers: Antheil and a radio guidance system
An avant-garde, modernist composer and a glamorous Hollywood film star hardly seem the most likely duo to come up with a torpedo guidance system, but that’s just what happened in the case of George Antheil and Hedy Lamarr. The pair joined forces after Lamarr had the idea that jumping between radio frequencies would make it much harder for a foe to intercept a radio-guided torpedo. (She’d gained her knowledge of military technology from being married to an Austrian arms dealer who circulated with the Nazis. She escaped in disguise and divorced him.)
Antheil had previously written his Ballet mécanique, in which 16 player pianos are synchronised, and that experience helped him co-invent a mechanism not dissimilar to piano player rolls to move between frequencies. The pair were granted a patent for their invention in 1942. It was later used for military communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and seen as a forerunner to Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth.
Inventive composers: Rachmaninov and Sikorsky
Rachmaninov was not short of a bob or two and he had a penchant for fast machines, which is how he came to be in the unlikely situation of turning around the fortunes of the aircraft manufacturer Sikorsky. Exiled from Russia, Rachmaninov had moved to the United States, where he lived for 25 years, composing little but pursuing a lucrative career as a pianist. One of his fellow Russian émigrés was the aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky, acclaimed back home for his multi-engine planes but unknown in the US. His fledgling aero-engineering company in Long Island, located on a chicken farm of all places, was struggling to make ends meet.
Word clearly got round as, according to the Sikorsky archives, one day in 1923 Rachmaninov rocked up in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Sikorsky’s son Sergei recalls: ‘After about a half-hour visit, Rachmaninov said, “I believe in you and your plane, and I want to help you.” The composer sat down and wrote a cheque for $5,000 (approximately $100,000 today). With a smile, he gave the cheque to the stunned Sikorsky and said, “Pay me back whenever you can.”’ The great musician’s contribution made all the difference. Rachmaninov became Sikorsky’s first vice- president, and six years later Sikorsky paid back the money with interest.
Inventive composers: Hofmann and his many patents
Rachmaninov recognised genius when he saw it, and he once named Józef Hofmann as the greatest pianist in the world. But the Polish pianist-composer wasn’t only a superlative virtuoso, he was also a prolific inventor with over 70 patents to his name. They ranged from electric clocks to windscreen wipers (inspired by the movement of a metronome), piano-key shock absorbers (still used by Steinway today) to motorboats. Hofmann’s passion for inventing started when he was young. When he was just 11, in 1887, he struck up a correspondence with Thomas Alva Edison, who later sent him his new phonograph.
Hofmann was fascinated by airplanes (Rachmaninov once took him on a visit to the Sikorsky factory) and, particularly, cars, for which he came up with pneumatic shock absorbers (tested by the New York police) and even a navigational device. ‘I have invented a helpful improvement of location-showing devices,’ he wrote in the description for Patent No. 909 7989 on 12 January 1909. The problem he had with maps for driving was that the scale of those used in cities was too big when the driver was travelling between cities and villages. The solution? A rotating disc featuring maps of different scales, that allowed the driver to navigate happily between town and countryside.
Inventive composers: Oram and the Oramics Machine
‘It’s a real bit of home brew. Just by looking at it, you can tell that it was always a work in progress. It was always being modified, and it’s unique,’ says Tim Boon, head of research and public history at London’s Science Museum, which is now home to one of the landmark inventions in electronic music’s history, the Oramics Machine. Boon is talking about an electro-mechanical interface that was an important forerunner to the MIDI sequencing and DAW technology used so widely today. It was the brainchild of Daphne Oram, who was a pioneer in the UK of musique concrète – where recorded sounds are used to create compositions, originally through manipulating tape.
Oram also had an inventor’s mind, and an ethos of self-reliance and experimentalism – and she came up with the idea of a machine that could, essentially, turn drawings into sound. It meant she could draw waveforms, pitches and volume envelopes onto film or glass, which was then optically scanned and used to synthesise sound. Oram found the machine had technical limitations, but the opening of her Bird of Parallax ballet music for the 1972 Edinburgh Festival was composed using the Oramics Machine.
Inventive composers: Ravel and the Whirlwind of Death
Ravel was dubbed the ‘most perfect of Swiss watchmakers’ by Stravinsky – but it was his father who was the real precision engineer. Pierre-Joseph was a prolific inventor (and civil engineer) whose gadgets included a machine for making paper bags and a water track with an artificial current for training swimmers. He was particularly fascinated by engines, and in 1868 came up with a ‘steam generator heated by oil, applied to locomotion’ – or, in other words, a steam-powered automobile.
However, one of his inventions resulted in tragedy. Pierre-Joseph had teamed up with his other son, Edouard, to create the Tourbillon de la mort (Whirlwind of death), a circus spectacle involving a car somersaulting ten metres up in the air. The pair had high hopes it would make them a fortune, and it was indeed a success when it was first presented to the public in March 1905. ‘The word “intrepid” is not enough, one has to say “heroic”,’ wrote Le Figaro.
But disaster struck on 14 April when the car crashed and the driver, Marcelle Randal, died from her injuries. Father and son had to appear in front of the French court but were ultimately acquitted of negligence. The following year, they filed their invention with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest his father’s inventions shaped Ravel’s music – the mechanical repetitions of Boléro, say, or the deathly implosion of La valse? Perhaps.
