A Little Night Music

"Day after day! night after night, one sits--amusing oneself as best one can--at a thousand concerts. Every night one hears the same tired instruments making the same tired noises. A cry from the violin, a boom from the drum. For 150 years the only new instruments to be invented are the saxophone, the musical saw, musique concrete and electronic devices. Why? In the United States, of course, there is TV. But what do we French do with our nights?"

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 pis."

In his 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 of music," said Baschet proudly.

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 his "sound" to a musician friend named Jacques Lasry, who proclaimed it "interesting." With Lasry's encouragement, Baschet has completed four nameless instruments, all of them already in their third incarnations, and plans to invent a score more.

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."

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