New Ways to Make Noise

The piano had a standard keyboard -but it sounded like a muted xylophone. There was a zitherlike instrument that resembled an outdoor barbecue cooker. An unrecognizable assemblage of crystal rods, stroked by musicians with moistened fingers, emitted resonant whoops that fluttered through attached whiskers of piano wire. At San Francisco's Conservatory of Music last week, an audience of 150 was captivated by the sounds -and sight -of some of the newest and weirdest musical instruments on earth.

All the instruments are the creations of French Sculptor Francois Baschet, 42, whose musical skill is limited to strumming a bar or two on a guitar equipped with an inflatable red plastic doughnut as a sounding board. During a seven-year sabbatical, the thought struck Baschet that all the world's music came from antiques. "For 150 years," says he, "the only instruments that have been invented have been the saxophone, the musical saw and concrete and electronic music. Why?" Baschet began to think of new ways of making noise.

He has since fabricated 30 instruments capable of hooting sepulchrally, barking savagely, trumpeting like a herd of elephants, and even producing echoing sounds of haunting beauty. Baschet dubbed his inventions Structures sonores and organized a small orchestra: his brother Bernard, Modernist Composer Jacques Lasry and several associates. The group is known in France as Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet. It plays some Bach and some Vivaldi -but Baschet's devices are more adaptable to the works of Composer Lasry, which struggle with such titles as Coil Spring Dance and Duet for Crystals.

Baschet's goggling assemblage of aluminum saucers, glass rods, pneumatic cushions, nuts, bolts and screws is familiar to Paris, where it often furnished far-out background music for radio, TV and films, e.g., for the movie The Sky Above -The Mud Below. In the U.S., where the French government sent them last month for a series of appearances at the Seattle World's Fair, Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet has drawn enthusiastic crowds.

Baschet's instruments are not electronically amplified, but they produce a moaning tumult of sound that is roughly Lasry-Baschet's idea of what modern music should be. "Conceptions aren't linear any more," says Composer Lasry. "Not like an onion, where you can peel off one orderly layer after the other. Our search is nothing but an attempt to get through music what we hear in life."

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