Luthéal
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The luthéal is a kind of prepared piano which extended the "register" possibilities of a piano by producing cimbalon-like sounds in some registers, exploiting harmonics of the strings when pulling other register-stops, and also some registers making other objects, which were lowered just above the strings, resound. But that instrument became obsolete before it became popular, partly due to most of the mechanics of the instrument being too sensitive, needing constant adjustment. The only pieces in the general repertoire to feature the Luthéal are L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (1920-5) and Tzigane (1924) by Maurice Ravel, performances of which tend to substitute an upright piano, either prepared with paper or straight.
[edit] History
The instrument is created by the Belgian George Cloetens and used by Maurice Ravel on Tzigane for luthéal and violin. The Brussels machine is a half-size 1919 Pleyel piano. It generates a range of hallucinatory colours, at times like a guitar, a harmonica. The performance is comparatively lightly bowed and reflective.
Ravel used the luthéal in one of the early 1897 sonata. Désert has played the same instrument Ravel used and the one, now in the Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels, that Beveridge Webster used when he and Samuel Dushkin gave the world premiere performance of this version, in October 1924. The premiere having been givenby Jelly d’Aranyi.
The Luthéal was, in Ravel's day, a comparatively new piano-like instrument that had several tone-colour (not exclusively "pitch") registers that could be engaged by pulling stops above the keyboard. One of these registers had a cimbalom-like sound, which fitted well with the gypsy-esque idea of the composition. The printed version of the original score of the Tzigane piece contained instructions for these register-changes during execution. The Luthéal, however, never really made it as a fashionable music instrument: by the end of the 20th century the first print of the "Luthéal" version of the accompaniment was still available at the publishers...
by that time the chamber music version of the piece relied on the piano as accompanying instrument. In this sense Tzigane is comparable to Schubert's "arpeggione" sonata: that piece was also written in order to promote a new uncommon instrument, and when the composition proved more popular than the instrument a few years later, execution shifted to a more common instrument (cello and viola in Schubert's case).
The short rise and fall of the Luthéal in 1920s Paris took place about a decade after the only French experiment John Cage was probably aware of when he developed the "prepared piano" idea around the middle of the 20th century: Erik Satie's execution of the piano version of the Piège de Méduse incidental music in 1913 or 1914, in which case the preparation was limited again to placing sheets of paper on the piano strings, in order to imitate the "mechanical" sound of the monkey puppet that figured in the play. Whether Satie himself saw any connection to a "tradition" of applying paper strips on piano strings is not known.
