During the Weimar Republic and early Nazi periods, German inventors and musicians developed an array of new mechanical and electrical instruments. Some innovators and experimentalists hoped to discover never-before-heard tones and timbres. Others imagined that new technologies would allow them to create new music that surpassed the physical and psychological limitations of musical performers. Still others sought to explode existing conceptions of musical sound and expand the range of human auditory perception. The instruments with which these artists and engineers created new music and undertook aesthetic investigations fell into three categories: automated keyboard instruments; gramophone discs and other audio storage media, which they used ‘productively’ to create new sounds; and electrophones (namely, Jörg Mager's Spherophone and Friedrich Trautwein's Trautonium).

Thomas Patteson's monograph, based on his 2013 dissertation, brilliantly illuminates this fascinating but little-known chapter of German music history. Readers with special interest in the music of the Weimar Republic or the history of music technology no doubt will be captivated by the details of Patteson's case studies. He describes the machines and careers of individuals who are often labelled ‘pioneers’ in surveys of electronic music, but whose experimental endeavours rarely have been described in detail in textbooks or scholarly literature. Few artefacts or audible traces of their work survive; and many of the music technologies of the 1920s and 1930s have been eclipsed by machines and software programs that are much more powerful and flexible. While musicologists and composers typically have viewed this stage of music-technological innovation as a chapter in the ‘pre-history’ of electronic music, even many of the experimentalists themselves felt they were pioneers in a nascent field, and eagerly anticipated a future in which their own instruments would be obsolete.

Patteson's book positions the ‘instruments for new music’ of its title not within a modernist historical trajectory, but as products of a particular time and place. Never before have the instruments of the 1920s and 1930s been so richly contextualized within a broader view of German intellectual thought. Patteson provides new details about the history and technical specifications of these instruments, and surveys repertoire composed for them. But most intriguing are Patteson's summaries of the contemporary reception of the movement. After the first few pages of his book, Patteson steps aside as an active narrator, providing ample space for the voices of the many men – composers, critics, engineers, and philosophers of technology – who produced a flurry of articles and essays describing and debating new music technologies. Patteson conveys the status of the instruments within music institutions of the period: contemporary music festivals and radio exhibitions, the Bauhaus, the November Group artists’ organization, and the research departments established in 1928 at the Berlin Academy of Music and the Berlin Institute of Technology. He also situates the new instruments and their reception with respect to the German national politics of the interwar period. In his concluding chapter, Patteson draws connections between the experimental practices described in his book and the post-war development of elektronische Musik at the Studio for Electronic Music of Northwest German Radio in Cologne.

Electricity is an invisible current running through Patteson's book. Electricity powers the reproducing pianos, the gramophone records, the photoelectric cells that made possible optical sound film, and the electrophones; it also links these instruments to subsequent developments in tape and computer music. Electricity-powered machines captured musical sounds and preserved them as ‘material’ objects – things that could be bought and sold, seen and touched – from paper piano rolls to the ‘sound canvases’ of gramophone discs (40). Yet electricity also made music invisible. In some musical demonstrations involving automatic instruments, the figure of the performer was conspicuously absent, leaving behind only ghostly traces on automatic keyboards. Similarly, motionless loudspeakers replaced the movements of musicians at instruments on the concert stage. But most remarkably, the ‘technological’ sounds of new electric instruments seemed to be conjured out of thin air, not produced by vibrating instrumental or human bodies. While electricity powers or amplifies all the instruments and processes Patteson discusses, he points out that mechanical instruments and sound media typically are left out of discussions of ‘electronic music’. Patteson discusses the two broad categories of instruments side by side, carefully avoiding any suggestion of a false narrative of progress from mechanical to electric instruments, and instead revealing the overlapping nature of the chronologies and personnel of the experimental circles in which he locates his various case studies.

In the first chapter, Patteson draws attention to the position of instruments at the centre of debates about the future of music. He surveys the influential writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, Ferruccio Busoni, and Adolf Weissmann, among others, contextualizing the new discourse about instruments within broader discussions of acoustical science, microtonal research, and modern music. He also draws attention to the complicated and contradictory symbolism of technology itself in the 1920s and 1930s, describing a tension between ‘technological euphoria’ and ‘technological anxiety’ (8). Automatic machines like the player piano were viewed by critics such as Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt as appealingly scientific, precise, and objective; these instruments could produce dispassionate, anti-romantic music constructed on abstract principles of clarity, order, and form. In contrast, electrophones could produce eerie, warbly, otherwordly voices; thus machines also were viewed as intensely expressive, irrational, uncontrollable, vehicles of ‘spiritual transport’, and means of transcending ‘profane reality and reach[ing] a state of timelessness or ecstasy’ (6). While detractors feared that German music might surrender its spirit to the machine, to proponents of the new instruments it was clear that the new music technologies of the 1920s and 1930s had enormous potential: to reshape the relationships between composer and player and audience, to encourage new types of collaborations between the arts, to dissolve the boundaries between noise and sound, and to allow musicians to explore new divisions of the octave.

In the second and fourth chapters of his book, Patteson explores the reconfiguration of recording media – reproducing pianos, gramophones, and optical sound film – into productive technologies. He emphasizes processes of direct inscription; for example, one might punch holes directly into player piano rolls, or carve tiny patterns directly onto wax-coated discs, or create ‘graphomusic’ by writing directly on optical sound film (84). In these scenarios, composers often had at most a limited sense of what their music would sound like when played back. Although these processes may be grouped conceptually, the sounds produced by mechanical instruments, gramophones, and optical sound film were strikingly dissimilar. Mechanical music for keyboard instruments tended to be percussive, fast, visceral music, overwhelmingly complex and contrapuntal. In contrast, works created for gramophone discs and optical sound film embraced noise and explored non-traditional ‘musical’ sounds.

In these chapters on recording technology, Patteson emphasizes the experiments of individuals not known primarily as musicians or even as inventors. The painter Piet Mondrian championed ‘pure form’ and developed an influential theory of ‘neoplasticism’ that he extended to music, which he imagined could be made ‘universal’ if it were produced by new instruments capable of perfect, objective sounds (88). The artist László Moholy-Nagy promoted ‘productive’ use of recording media, including the gramophone and film, proposed a ‘scratch-writing alphabet’, and ‘became the leading exponent of sound film as a vehicle for modernist experimentation’ (97). Patteson suggests that ‘one of the primary reasons why music historians have overlooked the technological undertakings of the Weimar period is that very few of the movement's major figures were professional musicians’ (7). The problem is not merely one of habit – at stake has been the status of the composer as visionary: the musicologist Curt Sachs, writing in 1927, worried that the ‘technique of the instrument builder’ would (in Patteson's words) ‘gain the upper hand in the unfolding of music history’ and overshadow the ‘mind of the composer’ (12). By 1930, Sachs had dismissed the movement outright as not motivated by ‘musical need’ but instead obsession with novelty (156). As musicologists today seek to de-emphasize and demystify the archetype of the ‘genius’ composer, Patteson's book presents an approach to music history that is neither composer- nor work-centric. To be sure, the inventors and artists he profiles were themselves creators and visionaries, but their instruments and technologies generated no unqualified masterpieces.

While Chapters 2 and 4 focus on little-known experimental side projects of individuals who became famous for their other more fully realized artistic endeavours, Chapters 3 and 5 profile two inventors, Jörg Mager and Friedrich Trautwein, who developed electric instruments that were in their time taken quite seriously by major institutions in Germany, and even briefly promoted as instruments for amateurs. Mager's Spherophones and Trautwein's Trautoniums are listed – but not discussed – in many prominent textbooks and surveys of electronic music. Trautwein's career stretched into the 1950s, and he became a relatively well-known figure in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. His association with the Nazi Party may account for his limited coverage in later scholarship on electronic music. Mager, an even more marginalized figure in the history of electronic music, receives by far his most in-depth English-language treatment to date in Patteson's book.

Mager, Patteson writes, was motivated in his experimental work by the belief that common-practice tonality was a dead end and new instruments were the key to musical progress (57). His earliest endeavours focused on ‘quarter-tone research’ (Mager's words), and soon Mager envisioned himself as an ‘artist-engineer’ whose radio instruments would allow him to develop an ‘ocean of tone’ (62). ‘For Mager’, Patteson writes, ‘the music of the future, unleashed by new instruments, echoed the timeless song of the cosmos’ (64). Mager built his first prototype of an electric instrument in 1921, inspired by Busoni, whose 1906 Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music described the American inventor Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium. As Patteson points out, Busoni fabricated his description of the Telharmonium's playing interface, upon which Mager based the design of his Spherophone (63). Design problems would plague Mager, whose instrument was often exhibited alongside and compared to Lev Termen's appealingly theatrical Theremin, which generally generated more interest among audiences. Both inventors conceived of their electric instruments as ‘technological extensions of the human body’ that allowed for expressive, nuanced performance. But it was Trautwein who developed the most elegant design for his instrument, which allowed players to produce a continuum of pitches, but also gave them the option to play fixed pitches with optional vibrato. The relative success of Trautwein's instrument, Patteson notes, signified a ‘professionalization’ of electronic instruments; Trautwein ‘came closer than any other invention of its kind to realizing the twin goals of electro-music: establishing an original, idiomatic repertoire and furnishing a universally accessible domestic instrument for the radio age’ (116).

Patteson's case studies reveal a persistent irony: while idealists hailed the instruments’ capacity to generate a ‘music of the future’ showcasing new timbres and microtonal scales, it was typical for public performances to feature exceptionally conservative repertoire, chosen to make the instrument sound most recognizably ‘musical’. For instance, at the height of Mager's fame, in 1930, he performed arrangements of music by Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, and Mendelssohn to showcase a new model of his instrument, the Partiturophon, which featured a keyboard-style interface and was designed to be compatible with the electrical outlets in people's homes (78). No longer conceived by Mager as a ‘tool of musical revolution’, the inventor instead viewed the Partiturophon ‘as an instrument of reproduction’, suitable for playing Bach fugues, folk songs, and popular songs (147). According to Patteson, the only surviving composition for Mager's instruments is the inventor's own Little Christmas Lullaby (148). Similarly, in 1931, Trautwein developed a Volkstrautonium (people's Trautonium), conceived as an instrument of domestic music-making, and mass-produced by the company Telefunken; a volume of sheet music for amateur players included arrangements for Trautwein's electrophone of chestnuts by Corelli and Mozart (132). Likewise, in his discussion of filmmaker Rudloph Pfenninger's ‘sonic handwriting’ method, Patteson describes the underwhelming effect of the resulting work: ‘Pfenninger's surviving films highlight a striking discrepancy between the modernist tenor of sound-film theory and the decidedly childlike quality of the music’ (111).

Throughout the book, Patteson encourages us to reflect on the relative absence of the ‘New Music’ that the instruments in his title ostensibly were ‘for’. The most prominent composer discussed by Patteson is Paul Hindemith, who makes several appearances, composing small works for Trautwein's electrophones (the two men were colleagues at the Academy of Music in Berlin), and creating a brief experimental work for gramophone records: a ‘trick recording’ made by altering recording and playback speeds. Hindemith also composed etudes and demonstration pieces for mechanical keyboard instruments; one of his pieces for Welte-Mignon accompanied an experimental short film. Patteson offers a fairly detailed account in the book of Hindemith's collaboration with the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer on the Triadic Ballet, for which Hindemith hand-punched rolls for the Welte-Philharmonie mechanical organ (44). (Parts of the original composition survive in Hindemith's Suite for Mechanical Organ, which was recorded in 1931.) Other composers who wrote pieces for mechanical instruments include Hans Haass (who became director of recording for the Welte company in 1925), Gerhart Münch, and Ernst Toch. But many of these works were studies, and few were as conceptually innovative as proponents of ‘mechanical music’ hoped they would be. Haass himself acknowledged the gulf between expectations and reality. True precision was unattainable, he wrote; the mechanical instrument's limitations were ‘scarcely different from those of the sound produced by human hands’ (49).

Patteson observes that the high rate of invention of new instruments overwhelmed composers; ‘amid a technological glut’, he writes, ‘composers warily kept their distance’ (155). No composer focused on posterity would bother composing for prototype instruments that were headed for immediate obsolescence. The Trautonium proves to be an exception, thanks in large part to the promotional work of Oskar Sala, the instrument's one and only prominent virtuoso, whom Patteson describes as ‘a one-man Trautonium evangelist’ (158). Sala facilitated the development of an authentic repertoire for the instrument by Hindemith (his composition teacher) and later by composers who rose to prominence during the Nazi years. But Sala performed old repertoire as well: Patteson recounts a presentation of the Trautonium in April 1935 to Joseph Goebbels; Sala played Bach, Beethoven, and Reger, accompanied by piano and cello (134). Goebbels was particularly interested in using the electronic instrument at mass gatherings; indeed, Trautwein's instrument was used to test the speaker system designed for the 1936 Berlin Olympics (140). A series of fifty-four broadcasts of ‘Music of the Trautonium’ was heard on state run radio in 1938–9, and a concerto for Trautonium and orchestra by composer Harald Genzmer was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic; in the early 1940s, Sala toured throughout Germany giving lecture-demonstrations (140–1). Patteson's discussion of the status of electrophones during the Nazi years contextualizes Karlheinz Stockhausen's declaration in 1970 that ‘electronic music began in Cologne in 1952–53’; Stockhausen's deliberate erasure of the early history of electric instruments in Germany may be understood as part of a broader effort to start anew after the war (163).

Patteson's account of the early history of twentieth-century ‘electronic music’ is so persuasive, it may be hard for readers encountering the topic for the first time to understand why this history would ever have needed to be ‘reclaimed’. Several factors beyond the Darmstadt composers’ influence account for the marginalized status of Patteson's subjects within traditional music-historical narratives. Perhaps most significant is the fact that subsequent developments in tape music and computer music eclipsed the potential of these early ‘instruments for new music’. Also, the composer- and work-centric Western music tradition is predicated on the continued performance of old works; in order for new electroacoustic works to enter the repertory, the instruments and audio storage media for which they are composed must be maintained and periodically reformatted. The broad movement Patteson describes did not produce works that have necessitated the upkeep of old instruments; no work composed for the Trautonium is as widely performed today as is, say, Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949), which calls for the Ondes Martenot, invented in 1928. (More recently, Thomas Adès featured this French electrophone in his 2016 opera The Exterminating Angel.) But equally significant in accounting for the marginalization of German ‘new music’ instruments of the 1920s and 1930s is the fact that many of the prototypes, most of the mass-produced instruments, and many of the fixed media works Patteson describes were lost or destroyed during the Second World War. The Welte company's recording pianos were destroyed when the factory in Freiburg was bombed; none of Mager's various Spherophones survived; most experimental works of gramophone music and optical sound film, such as Moholy-Nagy's Tönendes ABC, a synthetic sound film composition, are now ‘considered lost’ (113).

What does survive, of course, are the published accounts of the festivals, concerts, and demonstrations at which instruments and works were presented. In addition to giving voice to proponents of the new instruments, Patteson introduces some of their most compelling critics, such as Heinz Pringsheim. He also quotes and summarizes essays by engineers and philosophers of technology, including Ernst Cassirer, Friedrich Dessauer, Max Eyth, Ernst Kapp, and Eberhard Zschimmer. Patteson relies heavily on the reception of the ‘instruments for new music’ in European arts journals published in the 1920s – Der Auftakt, Ma, Melos, Die Musik, Musikblätter des Anbruch, De Stijl, and others. He frequently cites essays published in the edited collection Kunst und Technik, published in 1930 by Leo Kestenberg, a musician and former Busoni pupil, and refers often to engineer Peter Lertes's Elektrische Musik, the first book-length overview of electric instruments, published in 1933. Although Patteson's sources are all published books and articles, few of the passages Patteson quotes will be familiar to most English-language readers. Many of the journals he cites have not been digitally archived and are not widely available on microfilm; only a select few of the essays he summarizes or quotes have been translated and anthologized in English-language collections.

As valuable as it is to hear directly from many voices from the past, I often wanted to hear more of Patteson's own voice in the text. He could have clarified for the reader which ideas in his book are new, which interpretations are original, and which unexpected connections he is the first to draw. It is often unclear from the writing which ideas and facts are well known and which are new contributions to our understanding of this period. Furthermore, while the Weimar-era critics and philosophers become familiar to the reader over the course of the book, twenty-first-century media scholars and historians and philosophers of technology are mostly invisible in the body of Patteson's texts, although he cites many of them in his endnotes. The most important recent source for Patteson is a 2007 German-language history of German and Austrian electric instruments by Peter Donhauser, Elektrische Klangmaschinen: Die Pionierzeit in Deutschland und Österreich, but he places this acknowledgement at the bottom of a long discursive endnote. Likewise, Patteson often relegates jargon drawn from other scholars’ work to the endnotes, for better and for worse. In the book's final pages, he re-emerges as narrator and identifies by name a few scholars whose written histories of music technology understate the significance of the events and inventions of the 1920s and 1930s. In the very last paragraph of the entire book, he introduces one neologism of his own: ‘technovertigo’, which he defines as the notion that technology, so often conceptualized as a means of control and change, is itself endlessly changing, becoming obsolete, being replaced. I thought this was a useful term that encapsulated some of the most important ideas in Patteson's book, and wished that he had theorized or interpreted more of the history he surveyed.

Winner of the American Musicological Society's 2017 Lockwood Award, which recognizes a ‘book of exceptional merit’ published by an early career scholar, Instruments for New Music is an essential book for anyone who studies, writes about, or teaches topics in music technology, modernism, or Weimar culture. Patteson beautifully summarizes concepts in German intellectual history without assuming that his reader has read the relevant texts, and he includes many accessible technical discussions of the music machines and processes he writes about, breaking concepts down for readers and not assuming advanced understanding of the principles of electricity and engineering. Patteson has published the book with Luminos, the University of California Press's open-access publishing programme for monographs, which no doubt will encourage a wide range of readers to explore this fascinating book.