Word: baschet
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Thus prattled Paris' Francois Baschet, 36, an enterprising fellow who has been spending his nights inventing instruments to give the listener something new: "A cello with an echo, an instrument that sounds like the human voice, a piano that weeps-an infernal clavier. If I make 21st century instruments for the 20th century, tant...
...apartment last week, Inventor Baschet proudly displayed the result of his nightwork: a monstrous collection of iron plates, steely spirals, glass rods in spiky rows, pneumatic cushions of red-and-white plastic, wires, bolts and screws, hammers, dampers. One instrument looked like a pair of inflated pontoons tangled in elephant grass and topped by the huge backbone of a fish. He tapped, squeezed, rubbed, twanged, and out of the contraptions came an amazing series of sounds-some of them hootingly sepulchral, some barkingly savage, some bewitching in the echoing tintinnabulations they set in motion. "Here you see the future...
...Baschet's first musical invention was a collapsible guitar, built around an inflatable plastic cushion. It has a soft, seductive tone, can be deflated or patched like an inner tube. "After I invented it, I wanted to know why it worked," he explains. The search led him to Paris' National Library and books of 19th century acousticians, e.g., Helmholtz. Their theoretical discussions flashed through Baschet's teeming imagination and emerged as sounds-new sounds of otherworldly groans, melodious thuds and haunting echoes, which came from the vibrations of two metal spirals plus a plastic resonator. Baschet took...
Most advanced composers see hope for new musical sounds in the field of electronics, but Baschet disagrees. "Our music is to electronic music what fresh peas are to canned peas," he says. His instruments produce a tumult of resonant echoes-in contrast to the comparatively orderly overtones of orchestral and electronic instruments-thus automatically providing the dissonance that modern composers love. "All these resonators produce an ensemble of other sounds awakened by one note. As with metaphysics, it is precisely the chaos that is interesting...