Fw: R.I.P. Oskar Sala

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Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2002 07:19:25 -0800
From: Thomas Ziegler

Hello unto you.

It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of Oskar Sala,
one of our oldest creators and one of the founding fathers of
experimental music. From the Associated Press:

"BERLIN (AP) — Oskar Sala, the German composer and physicist whose novel
musical instrument produced the sound effects for Alfred Hitchcock's
"The Birds," died Tuesday, February 26. He was 91.

Born in the eastern German town of Greiz, Sala is known for developing
and mastering the trautonium, billed as the world's first electronic
musical instrument on its invention in 1929.

He performed with the Berlin Philharmonic several times, and the
instrument — a precursor to the synthesizer — was frequently used in
German ads in the 1940s and 1950s.

The trautonium was most famously employed to produce the bird calls in
Hitchcock's 1963 film. Few people realized the cacophonous calls on the
film were produced electronically.

Sala donated his original Mixtur-Trautonium to the German Museum for
Contemporary Technology in Bonn in 1995."