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    Remo Saraceni, 89, Dies; Inventor of the Walking Piano Seen in ‘Big’

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    His keyboard, which became famous after Tom Hanks melodiously hopped on it, displayed Mr. Saraceni’s vision of technology powered by “people energy.”Remo Saraceni, a sculptor, toy inventor and technological fantasist best known for creating the Walking Piano that Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia danced on in a beloved scene of the hit 1988 movie “Big,” died on June 3 in Swarthmore, Pa. He was 89.The cause was heart failure, said Benjamin Medaugh, his assistant and caretaker. Mr. Saraceni died at Mr. Medaugh’s home, where he had been living in recent years.Mr. Saraceni’s specialty was “interactive electronics,” he told New York magazine in 1976. His other inventions included a clock that could reply aloud when you asked it the time, a stethoscope stereo system that could boom out your heartbeat, and Plexiglas clouds that lit up at the sound of a whistle with a pastel color appropriate for a room’s lighting. All were powered by what Mr. Saraceni (pronounced SAR-ah-SAY-nee) called “people energy”: the voice, touch and heat of the human body.The power of this sort of technology to enchant its users became a pivotal plot element of “Big,” and in turn the central prop in one of the most fondly recalled scenes in recent movie history.After wishing to be “big” at a magical Zoltar fortunetelling machine, the movie’s main character, Josh Baskin, transforms from a 12-year-old boy into a young adult (played by Mr. Hanks). He gets a clerical job at a toy company whose owner, Mac (Robert Loggia), recognizes Josh as his employee one Saturday at F.A.O. Schwarz. Mac is a shrewd capitalist surveying his industry in action; Josh is a boy exulting in the world of toys (albeit in a man’s body).As Josh impresses Mac with his close knowledge of F.A.O. Schwarz’s wares, they happen upon Mr. Saraceni’s nearly 16-foot-long Walking Piano. With childlike absorption, Josh begins hopping on it to the tune of “Heart and Soul.” Mac, inspired by Josh’s un-self-conscious delight, joins him, making the performance a duet. To an awe-struck crowd, the two of them then do a rendition of “Chopsticks.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Herbert Deutsch, Co-Creator of the Moog Synthesizer, Dies at 90

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      An experimental composer, Mr. Deutsch collaborated with Robert Moog to create the first synthesizer to make a significant impact on popular music, launching a revolution in electronic music.Herbert Deutsch, who helped develop the Moog synthesizer, a groundbreaking instrument that opened up new frontiers in electronic music and brought a futuristic sheen to landmark recordings by countless artists, died on Dec. 9 at his home in Massapequa Park, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 90.The cause was heart failure, his wife, Nancy Deutsch, said.Mr. Deutsch, a Hofstra University music professor and experimental composer, joined forces with Robert Moog, an engineer and inventor, to introduce a modular voltage-controlled synthesizer in 1964.With its otherworldly sounds, which could call to mind both a Gothic cathedral’s pipe organ and an extraterrestrial mothership, the Moog (the name rhymes with “vogue”) was the first synthesizer to make a significant impact on popular music. Its debut marked the dawn of the synthesizer age.“There were plugged-in instruments before the Moog synthesizer, but none arrived on the scene with such awe-inspiring potential,” Ted Gioia, the music writer and author of the 2019 book “Music: A Subversive History,” wrote in an email. “The first recordings of Moog music from the 1960s felt like messages from the future, telling us that all the rules were going to change.”Many of those recordings turned out to define their eras. George Harrison purchased an oversized early Moog, which the Beatles used to color multiple tracks on their 1969 album, “Abbey Road,” including “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and Harrison’s composition “Here Comes the Sun.”The Moog reached a broader market in 1971 with the introduction of the compact Minimoog Model D, the first widely used portable synthesizer.“Within months of the first commercial Moog synthesizers showing up in retail stores, commercial recordings started to sound different,” Mr. Gioia said. The futuristic synthesizer beeped and booped its way onto the pop charts in 1972 with “Popcorn” by Hot Butter, and went on to become a driving force behind landmark songs like Kraftwerk’s arty “Autobahn,” Donna Summer’s disco classic “I Feel Love” (1977), Parliament’s epic funk freak-out “Flashlight” (1977) and Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk crossover hit “Rockit” (1983).The Minimoog Model D, introduced in 1971, was the first widely used portable synthesizer.Moog Music Inc.Even when it was not the featured instrument, the Moog provided moody textures to timeless songs like Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” (1973) and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” (1975). It also provided throbbing bass tracks to Michael Jackson’s mega-selling 1982 album, “Thriller.”While Mr. Moog handled the technical side of his namesake invention, during its creation Mr. Deutsch provided a practicing musician’s perspective, which was crucial in transforming it from an electronic gadget into a viable instrument.“Herb Deutsch was the catalyst for the invention of the synthesizer,” Michelle Moog-Koussa, Mr. Moog’s daughter and the executive director of the Bob Moog Foundation, said in a phone interview. “That is no overstatement.”“Herb would say, ‘This is what I need,’” she added, “and Dad would build the circuitry. It was a true partnership between a designer and a musician.”Despite his impact on music of all genres, Mr. Deutsch was the last person to trumpet his accomplishments.“I’m unwilling to go around shouting, ‘Look at me, I’m a part of the history of music,’” he said in a video interview with the Moog Music company in February. “But I do understand that Bob and I are an important part of music history, because that idea has been used in every direction that music can go into.”Herbert Arnold Deutsch was born on Feb. 9, 1932, in Hempstead, N.Y., the youngest of three children of Barnet and Miriam (Myersburg) Deutsch. His father was a clerical worker for the Veterans Health Administration, his mother a bookkeeper. With money tight, his parents also ran a small chicken farm on their property.In a detached garage next to the farm’s largest coop Mr. Deutsch, at age 3, had his first musical epiphany.“For some reason, I had picked up a long straight stick and, holding it in my right hand, was tapping it down on the dirt floor,” he recalled in a 2018 interview with Parma Recordings, a music production company. “At some point in this meaningless action I heard a note whenever I tapped the floor.”“It was a C,” he continued. “Then I tapped the floor an inch or so to the right and heard a D.”Soon he began to “tap out some melodies of music that I recognized as well as music that was new to me,” he said. “Suddenly, I stopped in terror. Of course I could not hear those actual pitches, or was the dirt floor truly magical?”The German rock band Kraftwerk was among the earliest exponents of the Moog synthesizer.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesHe started piano lessons a year later, and at 11, inspired by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, turned his sights to the trumpet. He played in bands throughout high school and during his years at the Manhattan School of Music, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees.One of his best-known compositions was the haunting, multi-media track “A Christmas Carol, 1963,” an aural collage interspersed with recorded news snippets and medieval chants composed to honor the four Black girls murdered in the infamous Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., that year.His performance of another modernist composition at the New York studio of the sculptor Jason Seley in January 1964 earned a positive review in The New Yorker. More significant, however, was the fact that Mr. Moog was in the audience.Mr. Moog, whom Mr. Deutsch had met at a music trade show, was working on his Ph.D. in engineering physics at Cornell University while running the small R.A. Moog Company, based in Trumansburg N.Y., which manufactured his versions of the theremin, the electronic instrument whose eerie space-age sound was a staple of 1950s science-fiction movie soundtracks.After the performance, the men and their wives went to dinner, where Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Moog discussed new possibilities for electronic music. Mr. Deutsch ended up commissioning a new electronic instrument, to be designed by Mr. Moog in collaboration with Mr. Deutsch.With Mr. Deutsch advising, Mr. Moog designed an instrument consisting of modules linked by patch cords that allowed musicians to create their own vast array of previously unheard sounds from scratch, whether to simulate acoustic instruments or to create their own distinctly electronic sonic palette.That same year, Mr. Deutsch wrote “Jazz Images, a Worksong and Blues,” the first composition for the Moog. Soon he was giving pioneering performances at Town Hall and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.In 1968, Wendy Carlos released “Switched-On Bach,” a watershed moment for the Moog, launching Baroque musical into the Apollo age and the Moog into the bedrooms and dorm rooms of baby boomers. Ms. Carlos also used the Moog to conjure the foreboding sound of a dystopian future on the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, “A Clockwork Orange.”After his work with Mr. Moog, Mr. Deutsch turned his attention back to teaching at Hofstra. In 1976, he published his first of three books, “Synthesis: An Introduction to the History, Theory & Practice of Electronic Music.”But in the late 1970s, he joined the Moog Company as marketing director and consulted on new synthesizer designs.By that point, sales of the American-made Moogs had begun to slide as cheaper Japanese synthesizers from companies like Roland and Yamaha came to dominate the market.In addition to his wife, Mr. Deutsch is survived by two children, Lisbeth Mitchell and Edmund Deutsch, from his marriage to Margaret Deutsch, who died in 1996; three stepchildren, Cheryl Sterling, Adam Blau and Daniel Rogge; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.The Moog synthesizer enjoyed a renaissance beginning in the 1990s, thanks to bands like the Beastie Boys, Wilco and Portishead. But by then, Mr. Deutsch had moved on from his days helping design synthesizers. He was, after all, a musician at heart, not an inventor.“A year ago I texted him to discuss something, and he said, ‘I can’t talk tonight because I have band practice,’” Ms. Moog-Koussa said. “He was 89 years old.” More

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      ‘2nd Chance’ Review: Just Shoot Me

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      Ramin Bahrani’s first documentary feature profiles Richard Davis, the irrepressible inventor of a modern bulletproof vest.In “2nd Chance” the director, Ramin Bahrani, introduces Richard Davis as the only man to have shot himself 192 times. The number is impressive and also excessive, which is one way of describing Davis, the jolly inventor of a modern bulletproof vest and a born salesman. Shooting himself repeatedly on tape, he wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of his vests, but what he was also doing was building a gonzo reputation too catchy to ignore or resist.It worked — I started this review with his pitch — but, directing his first documentary feature, Bahrani doesn’t content himself with Davis’s self-mythologizing, or with debunking it, really. As he chronicles the amusement-park ride of Davis’s life — from pizzeria owner to multimillionaire entrepreneur, through divorces and lawsuits and accidental deaths — he describes something akin to a human perpetual motion machine, running on entrepreneurial passion, gun-nut melodrama, a habit of hokum, and greed on autopilot.Davis’s prototype bulletproof vest arose out of a near-fatal 1969 shootout on a pizza delivery run, with three assailants. Typically enough, this encounter may not have happened as advertised, but in any case, Davis built up a successful new company, Second Chance, marketing to police departments with re-enactment-style promo films. Interviewed today in what looks like his den, he sits for Bahrani’s questioning looking like a relatively harmless uncle who can’t stop gabbing about his war stories.But Davis has also had trouble with sticking to the facts when his business interests were in jeopardy. That happens most egregiously when a ballyhooed new vest model proves to be fatally ineffective at stopping bullets. This and other failings carry a personal sting in the telling here by former employees, partly because the Michigan-based Second Chance seemed to retain a surprisingly local feel. (It was also a family affair, employing Davis’s formidable grandfather, dutiful son, and an ex-wife, Karen. Another ex-wife, Kathleen, offers inside scoops and colorful commentary.)Bahrani’s film (which he narrates) beetles along without fully exploiting Davis’s ample entertainment value, which is counterbalanced by accounts of his dubious actions and sometimes unseemly opinions. The vest scandal was no career-buster: Davis, and his son, eventually regrouped and started a new company. Davis’s collaborators, on the other hand, can’t help but look back: we hear extensively from Aaron Westrick, an eager-beaver police officer who went to work for Davis’s company after a vest saved his life.Despite Davis’s showmanship, Westrick might actually be the film’s most resonant figure — all the way up to and including a paradigm-shifting but somewhat overcooked reunion with Westrick’s assailant from decades ago. Westrick wants to believe in what Davis is selling, even as he is repeatedly disappointed — a loyalty to a myth that might have more to say about the country than Davis.As a fiction filmmaker, Bahrani often returns to the theme of the American dream and its not-so-surprising fallacies (“Man Push Cart,” “99 Homes”). Davis’s go-for-broke spirit seems to repel analysis here, and his story can even sound comparatively tame against the Wild West backdrop of mainstream gun culture. But maybe Davis’s vaunted 192 shots say it best after all: they suggest someone both acting out a kind of immortality and demonstrating an unmistakable death wish.2nd ChanceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Lenny Lipton, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ Lyricist and 3-D Film Pioneer, 82, Dies

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      He used the royalties earned from the hit folk song, based on a poem he wrote in college, to fund decades of research into stereoscopic projection.Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s bountiful royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.His wife, Julia Lipton, said the cause was brain cancer.Few people leave much of a mark on popular culture; Mr. Lipton was among the few who got to leave two, and in such wildly divergent corners as folk music and cinema technology.He was a 19-year-old student at Cornell when he sat down at the typewriter of his friend and fellow physics major Peter Yarrow. He had just read a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” and felt inspired to write his own.Some time later, Mr. Yarrow found the poem, still in his typewriter, and felt a similar inspiration. He put the poem to music, and in 1963 he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It begins: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea / And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.”Mr. Yarrow tracked down Mr. Lipton, who was working as a journalist in Manhattan, and gave him credit as a co-writer. (As Mr. Lipton told reporters repeatedly, despite persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)The song was such an immediate and lasting hit — Mr. Lipton called it his “MacArthur ‘genius’ grant” — that it allowed him to leave his job and move to California. In the Bay Area, he fell in with a circle of independent filmmakers and made several short films of his own.He received even more royalty income from his book “Independent Filmmaking” (1972), which became a niche but durable success, giving him enough of a financial cushion to explore yet another abiding interest: stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D technology.Mr. Lipton had fallen for it as a boy in early 1950s Brooklyn when the first wave of 3-D films arrived in theaters. He saw them all: “House of Wax,” “Bwana Devil,” “The Maze.” And while the craze passed — the technology was crude, the projectors were hard to synchronize, the cheap eyeglasses that had to be worn to see images in 3-D were clunky — his belief that 3-D was the future of film did not, and in California he began tinkering with ideas to make that belief a reality.“‘Puff’ gave me a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2021 interview with Moving Images, a YouTube channel. “I didn’t have to get a job. I spent years in my little lab in Point Richmond developing my stereoscopic inventions.”Mr. Lipton accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D technology, among them a screen that switches rapidly between left- and right-eye images, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and close in sync with the screen.He developed that technology, which he called CrystalEyes, in the early 1980s. It soon found applications far beyond the movie theater: Versions were used by the military for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling, and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.CrystalEyes equipment developed by Mr. Lipton. He had some 70 patents related to 3-D technology.CrystalEyes and other advances devised by Mr. Lipton seeded the emergence of a new generation of stereoscopic filmmaking, used in 3-D versions of movies like “Avatar,” “Chicken Little” and “Coraline.” Today, some 30,000 movie screens across the United States use 3-D techniques that evolved from his innovations.Mr. Lipton “changed the paradigm of the audience’s experience in cinema culture entirely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3-D animation at Arizona State University, said in an email.Leonard Lipschitz was born on May 18, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, owned a soda shop and died when Leonard was 12. His mother, Carrie (Hibel), a teletype operator, later changed their surname to Lipton.His mother inspired his love for film by taking him to some of Brooklyn’s many grand old movie palaces, like the Ambassador and the Paramount, while his father inspired his love for filmmaking by bringing home a toy film projector. Leonard soon assembled his own, using aluminum foil, a toilet-paper roll and a magnifying glass.He entered Cornell intending to study electrical engineering but quickly switched to physics, where he felt more freedom to experiment.After graduating in 1962, he got a job at Time magazine in New York, then became an editor at Popular Photography. After work he would head to a small theater in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, where he and some friends presented the latest movies to emerge from the city’s underground film scene.He did much the same in California, though without the need for a day job. He wrote a weekly film column for The Berkeley Barb, an alternative newspaper, and made several short documentaries shot on 16 mm film, including “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” about the clashes surrounding People’s Park in Berkeley, and “Children of the Golden West,” a rambling, touching portrait of his countercultural friends.In addition to “Independent Filmmaking,” Mr. Lipton wrote several other books, among them “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era,” an 800-page opus on the history of movie making.Along with his wife, he is survived by his children, Noah, Jonah and Anna. He lived in Los Angeles and died in a hospital there.Mr. Lipton had an idealistic certainty about the coming dominance of 3-D films, but he was also critical of the way Hollywood had limited its use to cartoons and action movies.“I had hoped that stereoscopic cinema would be about actors and acting and involve people in stories about the human condition, but that’s not what happened,” he told Moving Images. “What happened is, it’s a cinema of spectacle.”Still, he held out hope for something different around the corner.“As soon as someone has success, financial success, a stereoscopic documentary or a stereoscopic buddy comedy, then the studios will copy it,” he said. More

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      Dave Smith, Whose Synthesizers Shaped Electronic Music, Dies at 72

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      His innovations included the first polyphonic, programmable synthesizer and the universal connectivity of MIDI.Dave Smith, a groundbreaking synthesizer designer, died on May 31 in Detroit. He was 72.The cause was complications of a heart attack, said his wife, Denise Smith. Mr. Smith, who lived in St. Helena, Calif., had been in Detroit to attend the Movement Festival of electronic music, which ran from May 28 to 30, and died in a hospital.A statement from Mr. Smith’s company, Sequential, said, “He was on the road doing what he loved best in the company of family, friends and artists.”Mr. Smith introduced the first polyphonic and programmable synthesizer, the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, in 1978. It was used on 1980s hits by Michael Jackson, the Cars, Madonna, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, a-ha, Duran Duran, Genesis, the Cure and Daryl Hall & John Oates. Over the next decades, instruments designed by Mr. Smith were embraced by Radiohead, Arcade Fire, Dr. Dre, Flying Lotus, Nine Inch Nails and James Blake, among many others.In the early 1980s, Mr. Smith collaborated with Ikutaro Kakehashi, the founder of the Roland instrument company, to create MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), a shared specification that allows computers and instruments from diverse manufacturers to connect and communicate, making for countless sonic possibilities.Justin Vernon, who records as Bon Iver, wrote on Twitter, “Dave Smith made the best keyboards ever … that’s saying it lightly.”Denise Smith said in an interview: “He loved the people who used his instruments. He was very curious about how they used his instruments, how they made them sound.”David Joseph Smith was born in San Francisco on April 2, 1950, the son of Peter and Lucretia Papagni Smith. He played piano as a child and guitar and bass in rock bands, in high school and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. One of his college projects was working on a program to compose music, printing out the scores on a plotter. After graduating, he worked on what was then a new technology — microprocessors, integrated circuits on a chip — at the aerospace company Lockheed, in the area of California that would become known as Silicon Valley.He was intrigued by the synthesizer sounds on Wendy Carlos’s 1968 album, “Switched-On Bach,” he said in a 2014 interview with the Red Bull Music Academy. “It just had this life in it that was just amazing to hear.”In 1972, his interests in music and electronics converged when he bought a Minimoog, an early Moog synthesizer. He then built his own sequencer, a device to store and play patterns of notes on the Minimoog. In 1974, he started a company to build sequencers, Sequential Circuits — at first as a nights-and-weekends project, then as a full-time job, eventually as a company with 180 employees.Unlike a piano or organ, early synthesizers, like the Moog and ARP, could generate only one note at a time. Shaping a particular tone involved setting multiple knobs, switches or dials, and trying to reproduce that tone afterward meant writing down all the settings and hoping to get similar results the next time.The Prophet-5, which Mr. Smith designed with John Bowen and introduced in 1978, conquered both shortcomings. Controlling synthesizer functions with microprocessors, it could play five notes at once, allowing harmonies. (The company also made a 10-note Prophet-10.) The Prophet also used microprocessors to store settings in memory, providing dependable yet personalized sounds, and it was portable enough to be used onstage.Mr. Smith’s small company was swamped with orders; at times, the Prophet-5 had a two-year backlog.But Mr. Smith’s innovations went much further. “Once you have a microprocessor in an instrument, you realize how easy it is to communicate digitally to another instrument with a microprocessor,” Mr. Smith explained in 2014. Other keyboard manufacturers started to incorporate microprocessors, but each company used a different, incompatible interface, a situation Mr. Smith said he considered “kind of dumb.”In 1981, Mr. Smith and Chet Wood, a Sequential Circuits engineer, presented a paper at the Audio Engineering Society convention to propose “The ‘USI’, or Universal Synthesizer Interface.” The point, he recalled in a 2014 interview with Waveshaper Media, was “Here’s an interface. It doesn’t have to be this, but we all really need to get together and do something.” Otherwise, he said, “This market’s going nowhere.”Four Japanese companies — Roland, Korg, Yamaha, and Kawai — were willing to cooperate with Sequential Circuits on a shared standard, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi of Roland worked out the details of what would become MIDI. “If we had done MIDI the usual way, getting a standard made takes years and years and years,” Mr. Smith told the Red Bull Music Academy. “You have committees and documents and da-da-da. We bypassed all of that by just basically doing it and then throwing it out there.”In 2013, Mr. Smith told The St. Helena Star: “We made it low-cost so that it was easy for companies to integrate into their products. It was given away license free because we wanted everyone to use it.”Sequential Circuits made the first MIDI synthesizer, the Prophet-600, in 1982, and MIDI was formally announced in 1983. Nearly four decades later, the MIDI 1.0 standard is still ubiquitous, and MIDI controllers, which specify the parameters of an electronic tone, are available in everything from keyboard, wind and string instruments to cellphone apps.In 2013, 30 years after MIDI was introduced, Mr. Smith and Mr. Kakehashi shared a Technical Grammy Award.Yamaha bought Sequential Circuits in 1987, but by then cheaper digital synthesizers had grown more popular than analog instruments like the Prophet-5, and in 1989 Yamaha shut the company down.Mr. Smith married Denise White in 1989, and they settled in St. Helena, in Northern California. In addition to her, he is survived by their daughter, Haley; their son, Campbell; and four siblings.Mr. Smith worked in synthesizer research for Yamaha and then for Korg, where he was among the designers of the Wavestation, which was used for hits by Depeche Mode and Genesis. In the 1990s, he turned to designing software synthesizers — programs creating sound directly from a computer. He was president of Seer Systems, which in 1997 introduced the first professional software synthesizer, the Windows program Reality.But Mr. Smith decided he preferred using and designing hardware, and he returned to a hands-on experience making music. As analog synthesizers gained a new following in the 21st century, he founded Dave Smith Instruments in 2002. He collaborated with Roger Linn, the inventor of the LM-1 drum machine, on a new analog drum machine, the Tempest, and with another synthesizer inventor, Tom Oberheim, on the OB-6.In 2018, after Yamaha returned the rights, he renamed his company Sequential, and in 2020, when Mr. Smith turned 70, the company introduced a revived, updated Prophet-5.“Ultimately whatever I design is something that I want to be able to play when I’m done,” Mr. Smith told Waveshaper. “Otherwise, what’s the point?” More

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      ¿A qué suena el alma de Guatemala?

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      La imbaluna, uno de los instrumentos inventados por Joaquín Orellana que se exponen en la Americas Society.Credit…Victor Llorente para The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexPara expresar el sonido de Guatemala, él inventó nuevos instrumentosLas creaciones del compositor, inventor y escritor guatemalteco Joaquín Orellana son el tema de la exposición ‘The Spine of Music’ de la Americas Society.La imbaluna, uno de los instrumentos inventados por Joaquín Orellana que se exponen en la Americas Society.Credit…Victor Llorente para The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main story28 de febrero de 2021 a las 07:00 ETRead in EnglishNUEVA YORK — En un relato, el compositor, inventor y escritor guatemalteco Joaquín Orellana se imagina a un músico que, insatisfecho con los instrumentos de la civilización occidental, se propone crear el sonido del hambre. Poseído por el deseo de plasmar el sufrimiento de su pueblo, se va matando de hambre poco a poco y luego graba su voz alterada y delirante. En su delirio, ve cómo las partituras cobran vida con gritos angustiosos y violentos: el sonido del hambre.Orellana, de 90 años, es uno de los compositores más respetados de Guatemala y el centro de una cautivadora exposición en la Americas Society, The Spine of Music (La espina dorsal de la música) que da a conocer instrumentos —esculturales, surrealistas y oscuramente sensoriales— de su invención. Como protagonista de su historia, Orellana busca expresar el sufrimiento de un país traumatizado por el genocidio y la guerra civil, mientras evita usar los materiales de la música occidental.Orellana con el herroím, uno de sus “útiles sonoros”Credit…vía estudio de Joaquín OrellanaLa mayoría de los compositores escriben música para instrumentos que ya existen. A excepción de Wagner, quien creó un híbrido entre una tuba y un cuerno para su ciclo del “Anillo”. El compositor experimental Harry Partch inventó instrumentos adaptados a su sistema de afinación poco ortodoxo. En una entrevista en video desde Ciudad de Guatemala, Orellana habló de su proceso como un intento de liberar a la imaginación musical de las formas preconcebidas.“El compositor está imbuido de su realidad social”, dijo. “El compositor es una especie de filtro y su sensibilidad social está insertada en ese filtro”. Agregó que cuando las ideas musicales inundan la imaginación del compositor, “en esa mente auditiva están los conceptos y las imágenes de un contexto social, una realidad sociopolítica; y la música está inevitablemente en deuda con estas cosas”.Orellana comenzó a experimentar con los materiales de producción sonora en los años setenta. Estudió violín y composición en el Conservatorio Nacional de Música “Germán Alcántara” de Ciudad de Guatemala y después obtuvo una beca de dos años en el Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales de Buenos Aires, Argentina. El centro era un imán para los compositores innovadores de todo el subcontinente, y contaba con un estudio de música electrónica de última generación que despertó la imaginación de Orellana.Sebastian Zubieta, director musical de la Americas Society, toca el sinusoido pequeño de Orellana.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesCredit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesA su regreso a Guatemala no tenía recursos técnicos comparables y se sintió ajeno a la escena musical centrada en las tradiciones folclóricas expresadas a través de la marimba, el instrumento nacional.Sin embargo, Orellana se sentía fascinado por la marimba. Es muy probable que este instrumento haya llegado a Guatemala a través de las rutas de la esclavitud desde África occidental y que la población rural lo haya acogido como un símbolo de las esperanzas, el dolor y las injusticias de su país. Así que lo deconstruyó y le dio nuevas formas.Orellana llama a sus inventos “útiles sonoros”. “Mediante los útiles sonoros”, explica, “la marimba se extiende en el espacio acústico y físico como en una especie de Big Bang”.La imbaluna, una contracción de marimba y lunaCredit…Victor Llorente para The New York TimesLa primera herramienta sonora que recibe a los visitantes de la galería de la Americas Society es la esquelética imbaluna, con un teclado de marimba en forma de media luna, sustentada por resonadores puntiagudos (los nombres de los inventos de Orellana suelen ser portmanteaus poéticos, en este caso, compuesto por el prefijo “imba” de la palabra “marimba” y la palabra luna).El circumar tiene la forma de una gran tetera con teclas de marimba suspendidas en sentido perpendicular al suelo. Para el sinusoido, suspendió las teclas de la marimba siguiendo la forma de una curva sinusoidal, parecida a una montaña rusa. Ambos instrumentos se tocan pasando una baqueta por su interior en un movimiento continuo, una acción que exige al intérprete mover todo el brazo y el torso y que produce sonidos tintineantes. Sebastián Zubieta, director musical de la Americas Society, comentó que en las creaciones de Orellana “es el gesto el que da la forma”.Estos instrumentos —y otros con formas similares, que usan carillones de metal o cañas de bambú— pueden tener un sonido increíblemente parecido a la música electrónica. Zubieta comentó que no era casualidad que los sonidos creados en un instrumento con forma circular o sinusoide se parezcan a los creados a través de los bucles y la secuenciación electrónica. “Es como una pieza de cinta antigua”, dijo. “Es una solución de baja tecnología para un deseo vanguardista”.El herroímCredit…Victor Llorente para The New York TimesEl cirlum pequeñoCredit…Victor Llorente para The New York TimesEl periominCredit…Victor Llorente para The New York TimesThe prehimulinho.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesEl ingenio de los inventos de Orellana oscila a menudo entre el juego y la crueldad. El periomin es una especie de perchero mecedora que, cuando se pone en movimiento, hace que los carillones o campanas de viento se balanceen de un lado a otro a lo largo de cuerdas de cuentas de plástico, que producen el sonido de una cascada vidriosa. El pinzafer consiste en una enorme lámina de hierro con forma de cola de langosta, suspendida de un armazón de hierro. Al pasar un arco, encordado con cuerda de piano, por un recorte dentado, se produce un gemido oscuro y metálico. Al pasar el arco (esta vez con cuerdas de acrílico) por el tubarc, un tubo de aluminio con un orificio en el centro montado sobre un marco rectangular, se produce un silbido que de tan agudo hace rechinar los dientes.En sus composiciones, Orellana suele utilizar sus inventos junto con cantos corales, sonidos ambientales grabados e instrumentos occidentales. En 2017, compuso “Sinfonía desde el Tercer Mundo” para la edición número 14 de la Documenta, la exposición de arte contemporáneo en Atenas; llenó el escenario con coros de adultos y niños, una orquesta sinfónica y sus útiles sonoros. Fue una réplica a la Sinfonía n.º 9 de Dvorak, subtitulada “Desde el Nuevo Mundo”.Un instrumento llamado CF A.Credit…Victor Llorente para The New York TimesPara la exposición de la Americas Society, compuso una nueva pieza exclusivamente para sus creaciones. La pieza, titulada “Puntos y efluvios”, estaba pensada para ser interpretada por cuatro percusionistas dentro de la galería y tenía la intención de invitar a los miembros del público a participar en ciertos momentos con gritos, aullidos y llantos en un lenguaje inventado por Orellana.Debido a las limitaciones de la pandemia, Zubieta grabó por su cuenta cada parte de su composición; la pieza editada, con sus tintineos de alfileres y sus ráfagas de estruendos, ahora ronda por la galería a intervalos regulares. Un video de acompañamiento alterna entre tomas del intérprete inmerso en los gestos ritualistas de la música e imágenes de la partitura gráfica de Orellana, que, con garabatos rítmicos, grupos de puntos y diagramas coreográficos, remite a la visión de su relato de los pentagramas de las partituras que se derriten.Zubieta toca lenguatón.Credit…Victor Llorente para The New York TimesAl rememorar su carrera, Orellana hace una reflexión: “Hacer música para mí nunca fue un proceso determinado, sino una forma de liberarme de las obsesiones: la obsesión por manifestar el sonido y una cierta necesidad compulsiva de sacarlo de mi ser”.“He llegado a la conclusión de que lo que intento es liberar el sonido”, resumió.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More