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Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson’s fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts.

Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film-these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution.Instruments for New Musictraces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson's fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts.

The history of experimental sound technologies in the early twentieth century has long been standardized into a well-trodden tour of the same familiar highlights: Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium, Russolo’s Art of Noises, the prophetic visions of Busoni and Varèse, the novelties of Theremin. In both general histories and specialized accounts of “electronic music,” these topics are generally treated as appetizers preceding the main course, which commences promptly after World War II with the emergence of the dueling schools of musique concrète and elektronische Musik. In recent years, this narrative has been questioned and extended in a number of important ways, and the previously unsuspected depths of early twentieth-century musical technoculture have begun to be sounded.1 This is not merely a matter of quibbling over whether electronic music began in the 1950s or the 1920s; broadening the historical scope to include earlier phenomena makes for a new image of electronic music, one that highlights the social and cultural contexts that are often written out of canonic histories.

This project explores 20th century intellectuals in German-speaking Europe and the United States who studied the human world by exploring what I term the “complexity problem.” That problem has two elements. First, it emphasizes that humans have a limited capacity for processing complexity. On the individual level, we have limited cognitive capacities for obtaining and communicating knowledge and information, storing knowledge and information, making calculations, making decisions, and so forth. There are analogous limits at the group level; human organizations, economies, and societies are also limited in their abilities to process complexity. The second element of the complexity problem as analyzed by these intellectuals is that for a variety of reasons, the modern world is increasing in its complexity. Among them are the explosion of knowledge production, new media technologies, industrialization, the development of a global economy, the growth of ever-larger organizations, and the greater tendency to be exposed to a variety of worldviews and choices. The “complexity problem” arises from the incongruence of these two parts (limits for dealing with complexity and the fact that the world is becoming increasingly complex). For each of these intellectuals, how humans responded to this “complexity problem” incongruence provided a lens to try to understand a variety of human behaviors and social phenomena. Moreover, the responses to increasing complexity themselves could become sources of increasing complexity. The research here draws upon the published work of influential intellectuals who operated in a variety of academic disciplines and modes of thought (including: philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, systems sciences, management studies, cognitive psychology, and more). In the course of the twentieth century, each developed his own means for studying the “complexity problem,” often through the use of analogies. While in the earlier part of the century these lenses and analogies were developed largely independently, in the second half of the twentieth century, the dominant lens became understanding human individuals, groups, and societies as analogous to information processing systems: electronic digital computers. The dissertation thus points to a common theme in a variety of disciplines and settings, the similarity of which has hitherto been largely unexplored.

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