The Instrument as Composed, Used, and Appropriated

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The Repertoire for Strings and Live Electronics as a Paradigmatic Site of Traditional and Electronic Lutherie

Article by Gabriele Boccio

Electronic lutherie is often understood as the design or construction of new devices. This paper proposes instead to read it as a compositional condition, defined less by the object produced than by the position a composer occupies in relation to an instrumental and electronic apparatus. Building on the discourse of composed instruments (Schnell and Battier 2002; Tomás 2026), it distinguishes three such positions— composer-luthier, composer-user, and composer-appropriator—through which the instrument may be composed, integrated, or appropriated. These positions are proposed as general to contemporary electronic lutherie; the repertoire for strings and electronics is examined here as their paradigmatic site, since it stages with unusual clarity the encounter between an old lutherie and a new one. Three case studies follow: Michelangelo Lupone, whose systems embody compositional thought; Kaija Saariaho, whose optional electronics extend an autonomous instrumental imagination; and Johannes Fritsch, whose Partita (1965–66) appropriates the live-electronics practices of the Cologne studio and reorients it, together with an inherited Baroque form, towards the inner life of the viola. Read as positions rather than fixed identities, the categories become a mobile analytical tool for tracing how agency is distributed among composers, performers, instruments, and technological environments.
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tags: lutherie, Human–Machine Performance, live electronics, Extended Technique, history of technology

1. INTRODUCTION

In the repertoire for strings and electronics, electronic lutherie should not be understood solely as the design or construction of new devices. It may also be approached as a compositional condition in which instruments, gesture, processing systems, and performance configurations embody specific aesthetic intentions and shape musical thought from within, intersecting in different ways. In this sense, the question is not only what a tool is, but how it bears the stamp of its creator, how it suggests particular musical purposes, and what forms of agency emerge when performers and composers interact creatively with it (Alperson 2008). Electronic lutherie, then, is also a way of organising relationships between sound, gesture, technology, and form.

The conceptual ground for such an inquiry has been prepared, over more than two decades, by a substantial body of work on composed instruments and on the porous boundary between instrument-making and composition. For example, Marc Battier and Norbert Schnell introduced the notion of composed instrument to describe computer-based systems in which the sound-producing and the gestural performance parts are decoupled, so that gesture is linked to sound production in non-direct ways; the instrument thereby comes to carry “as much the notion of an instrument as that of a score” (Battier and Schnell 2002), destabilising the separation between tool and work. More recently, Tomás (2016; 2026) has extended this by arguing that the instrument’s score is not intended as an external prescription imposed upon the device, but emerges from its material and symbolic affordances, mediating the performer’s engagement with its sonic and physical properties—reconnecting this idea to the experimental practices of the Sonic Arts Union, where, in Alvin Lucier's account, the scores were inherent in the circuitry rather than written for it, and electronic instruments were already understood as embodying compositional elements. Together with the broader trajectory of digital lutherie and instrument studies (Wanderley 1998 RIVERIFICA!; Bovermann et al. 2017), these contributions help to provide the horizon within which the present article situates itself.

The three figures discussed below are proposed as a a complementary articulation of this literature, and the distinction is worth making precisely, because a tripartite scheme already exists in the same genealogy: Battier (1999) read electronic instruments through the categories of instrument, machine, and representation—a triad describing what an apparatus is and how it encodes a task. The present framework asks a different question, foregrounding the position the composer occupies in relation to the apparatus and the modes of authorial inscription that emerge when it is composed, integrated, or appropriated. One scheme classifies apparatuses, the other relations to them.

That the third of these relations has a longer history than the case discussed here is worth stating at the outset: composers in the Milan studio of the 1950s were expected to accept the constraints of the technical environment and to work through a technician, yet Berio, Pousseur and Cage quickly found degrees of liberty within it (Battier and Schnell 2002). Appropriation was a practice before it became a category. It is also crucial to highlight that the three positions proposed here are not specific to bowed strings: they are offered as general to contemporary electronic lutherie. Strings are chosen as their paradigmatic site because in this repertoire an old lutherie—sedimented over four centuries into the instrument’s body, technique, and repertoire—is directly confronted with a new one, so that what each takes for granted becomes reciprocally visible.

This article addresses these issues through three complementary paradigmatic figures: the composer-luthier, the composer-user, and the composer-appropriator.¹ These are not rigid taxonomies but critical, heuristic models: they help articulate tendencies that often coexist, overlap, or shift even within the work of a single composer. The discussion therefore does not aim at exhaustive historical coverage, but focuses on three figures whose work illuminates distinct yet related ways of understanding the role of the instrument and the electronic apparatus within composition.

Michelangelo Lupone exemplifies the composer-luthier, for whom the compositional process includes the design of systems for synthesis, sound transformation, and spatialisation, and the elaboration of models redefining the relation between instrumental gesture and technological mediation. Kaija Saariaho represents the composer-user, deploying electronics not as the origin of compositional thinking but as a means of extending an already autonomous instrumental imagination. Johannes Fritsch, finally, exemplifies the composer-appropriator through Partita (1965–66), in which the apparatus of the Cologne studio—contact microphones, magnetophones, filters, and regulators—is inherited from the Stockhausen Ensemble and reoriented towards the inner life of the viola, the composer’s own instrument.

Taken together, these figures make it possible to distinguish situations in which the apparatus is generated as part of the compositional process, those in which it extends an already autonomous instrumental poetics, and those in which a historically situated technological environment is appropriated so intensively that its re-authoring becomes a compositional strategy in itself. In general, instruments and technological systems are not neutral means placed at the disposal of compositional will; they condense constraints, affordances, histories, and aesthetic decisions, shaping the performer’s action and redistributing agency across composers, performers, tools, and spaces. Through Lupone, Saariaho, and Fritsch, electronic lutherie emerges less as a unified category than as a field of tensions in which different compositional attitudes towards tools and instrumental media become audible.

2. MICHELANGELO LUPONE AS COMPOSER-LUTHIER

Among the figures associated with compositional lutherie, Michelangelo Lupone (1953) offers a particularly clear case. His work shows how the compositional process may extend well beyond the instrumental writing, to include the design of systems for synthesis and processing, the development of spatial models, and the exploration of instrumental gesture as a field of technical and formal invention. Here the apparatus is not a neutral support: it is one of the places where the work takes shape.

This is especially evident in the second of the four pieces of his Ciclo Astrale: Altair (1986) for violin, digitally synthesised sounds on tape, and the Fly10 system. In these works instrumental and electroacoustic writing emerge within a broader apparatus of synthesis, sound transformation, and spatial projection. The quadraphonic tape materials of Altair were generated with the Fly10, a programmable digital synthesiser designed by Lupone and developed in collaboration with Laura Bianchini in 1983 around four TMS32010 processing boards, among the first Italian systems for real-time digital synthesis through additive and frequency-modulation algorithms (Lupone 1986; Di Scipio 2021). Each board carried a TMS32010 DSP (Assembler language) communicating with the host through a 16-bit parallel interface; a fast interface served two 61-note keyboards operating in parallel, with a polyphony of twenty or ten notes each, and the conversion stage comprised four 20 kHz D/A converters.²

VEDI DISCORSO EDITOR

The live chain of the first version combined a reverberation unit, with control over duration and decay, and a chorus unit whose frequency shift the composer confines to a quarter-tone above and below. The entire apparatus was part of the work’s emergence.

A second version was realised in 1992, after the opening of the CRM (Centro Ricerche Musicali) in Rome. It added programmable reverberation and real-time processing on the more advanced at the time Fly30 system: it was a hardware-software system for the analysis, synthesis and processing of sound in real time which was developed in 1989–90 by Antonio Pellecchia and Lupone himself with the specific aim of rethinking traditional numerical calculation algorithms through their implementation on a floating-point DSP, and to experiment with original algorithms and new control systems for real-time applications. The software was developed by CRM in collaboration with the CNR (National Research Council), providing musicians with a set of software modules object-oriented for musical composition at every stage: orchestration, score generation and real-time performance control, as well as a powerful interface for parametric control.

For the second version of Altair, the processing algorithms were re-implemented, the tape sounds reduced to a stereo digital master on DAT, and the two tracks transferred to a digital multitrack with the time-scansion (click) on a separate track, sent to the performer’s earphone for synchronisation.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the treatment of vibrato, the principal performance technique on which Altair is built. Lupone extends control over it by articulating it into four parameters—left-hand pressure on the string, speed of the gesture, amplitude of the gesture, and direction along the string—a decomposition that stands in direct correlation with FM synthesis, particularly when sub-audio frequency values are applied to the modulating oscillator (Lupone 1986). A technique so historically sedimented in string practice is thus rethought according to the logic of a system the composer himself designed: instrumental gesture and synthesis algorithm become structurally homologous. The same convergence operates in the opposite direction. Since certain positions on the fingerboard do not yield harmonics of precise pitch, this indeterminacy—consistent with the synthetic materials on tape—is turned to compositional account: where violin and synthetic sounds tend to fuse, the composer invites the performer to imitate the pitch indeterminacy of the electronic part through coherent vibrati, quarter-tone inflections, and the short glissandi notated in the score.

Lupone pursued this research further in Corda di metallo (1997) for string quartet, tape, and the Fly30 system. It was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and realised at the CRM in Rome, where the compositional process extended to a physical model of the string and the bow, developed with Mauro Palumbi and Lorenzo Seno, and to a precise treatment of sound diffusion in the listening space (Andreuccetti 2024; Cianciusi 2005). That the model formalises not only the resonating body but the bow is telling: what is modelled is the coupling of gesture and material. Extended string techniques are accordingly central here not as a catalogue of unusual sounds, but as a way of articulating the relation between gesture and process, and the parameters the model exposes belong to the compositional logic rather than to external technical data.³

This is precisely where Lupone’s work becomes paradigmatic for the figure of the composer-luthier. The musical instrument, the electronic system, the physical model, and the spatial behaviour of sound are not separate domains, but they are brought into a single field. In this sense the “instrument” of the work is not simply the violin or the string quartet, nor even the combined ensemble of strings and electronics: it is an apparatus composed through the interaction of instrumental technique, technical design, synthesis, modelling, and diffusion. Lupone has since given this condition a name of his own—the strumento-opera, the instrument-work, the point at which, in his formulation, music takes on matter and form (Lupone 2019).⁴

Another important dimension in Lupone’s work is the centrality of instrumental gesture. In the repertoire for strings and electronics, gesture can easily be reduced to input data, or else treated as a residue of instrumental tradition surviving beneath technological mediation. Lupone avoids both reductions. His work does not dissolve gesture into pure control information, nor does it leave it untouched as a sign of instrumental authenticity. Instead, gesture becomes a site of inquiry through which the relation between performer and system is reshaped (Di Scipio 2021). The performer’s action is linked to electronic and spatial processes in such a way that the sonic identity of the work cannot be reduced either to instrumental execution alone or to electronic design alone.

This also reveals how the stamp of the creator may be inscribed into an apparatus. Lupone’s systems embody a clear aesthetic orientation—an interest in physical modelling, in the continuity between extended techniques and electronic transformation, and in spatialisation as a compositional dimension rather than a mode of reinforcement. Their affordances are not generic but directed, shaped, and constrained by an underlying compositional thought.⁵, 6

What defines the composer-luthier is therefore not simply the fact that the composer builds or helps design technical tools, but the extent to which this design activity becomes constitutive of the musical work. The instrument is not merely used but it is conceptually composed, and the boundary between tool-making and composition becomes productively unstable.

3. KAIJA SAARIAHO AS COMPOSER-USER

The finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) illustrates in her work a different model, in which electronics extend and amplify an instrumental and timbral imagination that remains fundamentally autonomous in the compositional idea(Moisala 2009). The category of “user” can be misread as a less inventive or less technically informed practice; her work shows the opposite. In fact, the approach is highly selective, deliberate, and aesthetically precise. What distinguishes it from the composer-luthier model is not a lack of sophistication but a different distribution of compositional labour—electronics serving a thought whose structural and poetic identity does not depend on designing the tool.

The technical means she employs largely reflect the IRCAM environment, yet they are consistently directed towards the timbral extension of an instrumental part that remains autonomous. From her student years onward she treated amplification itself as a form of orchestration, using it to bring into audibility sounds produced by unusual or complex modes of playing—wind multiphonics, string harmonics—whose levels are too weak to register in a normal listening context (Barrière 1999). Her language inherits the “vertical” thinking of the French spectral composers, less oriented towards the contrapuntal development of individual lines than towards the internal morphology of sound. Electronics accordingly emphasise, rather than counter or counterpoint, the timbral and expressive potential of the live instrument; sound direction follows the instrument’s dynamics according to the performance context—interpretation, available means, room acoustics—without ever overwhelming it.

Petals (1988) for cello and live electronics exemplifies this with particular clarity. By the composer’s own account its material stems directly from Nymphéa (Jardin secret III, 1987) for string quartet and electronics, from which the title derives—and the harmonic structure of that quartet rests in turn on complex cello sounds analysed by computer. The electronic imagination here does not precede the instrument; it grows out of a close listening to it. The electronic part requires a digital reverberation unit whose reverberation time and wet amount are varied as specified in the score, a harmonizer producing microtonal frequency shifts, and a stereo pair of loudspeakers (Saariaho 1988).⁷ The apparatus is restrained and, crucially, complementary: the writing retains its full meaning without it: the instrumental writing retains its full structural and expressive meaning without it, and the electronics extend, colour, and prolong an identity that is already complete⁸.

That restraint is legible in the organisation of the piece. Petals alternates fragile, coloristic passages with more sharply focused figures of clear rhythmic and melodic profile, the former giving birth to the latter before they dissolve back into filigree. Timbrally this maps onto the sound/noise axis Saariaho had theorised a year earlier, along which noise assumes the role of dissonance and sound that of consonance, so that timbre takes over what she calls “the dynamic function of harmony” (Saariaho 1987b); in Petals the axis runs from the purest high harmonic to the dense scratching produced by heavy bow pressure near the bridge. What is striking is that the two electronic processes do not open a dimension orthogonal to it: they run along it. Reverberation prolongs and diffuses, carrying a sound towards the blurred pole the bow already reaches by other means; the harmonizer’s microtonal detuning sets the signal beating against itself, clouding a pure harmonic much as increased bow pressure would. The apparatus does not add an axis to the instrument; it extends one already inscribed in the bow—an economy that Saariaho’s own remark on the one-dimensionality of that axis suggests was deliberate rather than incidental. This, rather than any modesty of means, is why the electronics can be declared optional: they are redundant in the strict sense—a second route to a region of the sound-world the cello can already reach alone.

[MEDIA — Saariaho 1] AUDIO: two short excerpts placed side by side — a passage at the “clean” pole (high harmonic) and one at the “noisy” pole (heavy pressure near the bridge) — with the processed and unprocessed signal alternating, so that the claim that the electronics run along the instrument’s own axis can be heard rather than asserted.

Près (1992), for cello, stereo digital tape, and live electronics, deepens the relation without altering it. Its three movements are based on recordings made with the cellist Anssi Karttunen, subsequently analysed and used as a point of departure for the work’s harmony and for its synthesis parameters⁹. Compared with Petals, the real-time processes are far more numerous, and the electronics acquire also a formal function: they delineate sections, identify cadences, and lend fluidity to the musical discourse—a kind of electronic punctuation. Yet the harmonic structure remains determined almost entirely by the cellist. The apparatus articulates the form; it does not generate it.

The same position persists as the technology grows more elaborate. In later works such as Vent Nocturne (2006) for viola and Frises (2011) for violin¹⁰, real-time processing takes the signal of a miniature microphone mounted on the instrument, joined by the triggering of pre-recorded material, on patches realised in Max MSP by Barrière. Across twenty-three years the apparatus becomes vastly more complex, yet the compositional position does not shift: the instrument is never redesigned, the systems are consistently realised by others, and their role remains that of extending a writing that could stand without them. The composer-user is defined not by how little technology is involved, but by where authorship of the apparatus lies and what function it is assigned.

Their agency is less visible as technological invention than as aesthetic mediation (Leman 2008). In Saariaho’s case the stamp of the creator lies not in the invention of an apparatus but in the poetically oriented selection of what a given apparatus can do. Agency is redistributed accordingly: the performer remains central and the instrumental writing retains its autonomy, while electronics modify the perceptual field in which the performance is received. Their agency is less visible as technological invention than as aesthetic mediation (Leman 2008)—a tool may bear the imprint of compositional intention not because the composer built it, but because its affordances have been selected and integrated into a highly specific musical world.

Electronic lutherie, on this model, need not be equated with technological novelty. RIVERIFICA!!!!

[MEDIA — Saariaho 2] Fig. petals: live-electronics setup of Petals (SVG). | AUDIO A/B: the same passage played with and without electronics, demonstrating the optionality argument above. | AUDIO: closing bars of the cello part in Nymphéa followed by the opening of Petals, documenting the derivation.

4. JOHANNES FRITSCH AS COMPOSER-APPROPRIATOR

Where Lupone composes the apparatus and Saariaho integrates an already autonomous one, Johannes Fritsch (1941-2010) represents a third position, in which the appropriation of existing technological devices itself becomes a distinctive compositional mode. The figure that emerges is best described not properly as an expert user—a term whose origins in ergonomics and human-computer interaction emphasise proficiency over authorship—but as a composer-appropriator: the apparatus is neither conceived by the composer, nor merely absorbed into an existing language, nor built for him by others: it is actively reoriented — through his own intimate knowledge of the instrument — towards ends he defines himself.

This position is exemplified with particular clarity by Partita (1965–66) for viola, contact microphones, filters, and regulators, scored for four players and dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen (Fritsch 1968)¹¹. The fact that Stockhausen appears here not only as the dedicatee but also as one of the electronic performers, and that Fritsch was a member of the Stockhausen Ensemble from 1964 to 1970, makes this connection unmistakable. The electroacoustic apparatus—including tape machines— is recognisably that of the Cologne studio in the mid-1960s. For example, the same band-pass filter (Maihak W 49, see in Figure X) and regulators were used as live instruments that Stockhausen had deployed in his Mikrophonie I (1964), the first european live-electronics piece.

In Partita this reorientation is legible in the electroacoustic architecture. Two contact microphones on the viola feed a system built on a ten-second tape delay with controlled feedback (Fritsch 1968). The technical notes in the score names precisely the devices used: Telefunken ELA amplifiers (a rebuilt 2 V 610 with V 644, and a V 617 with V 644), Maihak W 49 and W 66 filters, a Tonographie V 301 with eight V 72 k, and two Telefunken M 5 machines, one for recording and the other one for stereo playback: the delayed signal is re-injected through a feedback regulator and next filtered and spatialised across loudspeakers moved through the space. This particular mechanism of interaction between tape recorders is call "tape echo delay" ad is generally thought to have originated at the Cologne Studio approximately ten years before through the work of the researcher and educator Werner Meyer-Eppler. It consisted of a simple delay created by feeding the signal back between the recording and playback heads of tape recorders (Di Scipio 2021).¹²^{Fritsch adds that the circuit may of course be realised with equivalent equipment.}

Fritsch Partita Electroacoustic setup copia

An interesting element is that Fritsch occupies, at once, positions that in the other two cases remain distinct. He was composer, violist, and—through the 1960s—technical assistant on many Stockhausen productions connected to the WDR in Cologne and to the Osaka Expo of 1970. The relation between composer and performer, on which the preceding categories implicitly rest, here lapses: he writes the piece, plays it, and knows the apparatus from inside its operation. Certainly, appropriation take place from the adoption of someone else’s tools— the instrumentation of the Cologne studio—but above all as a turning of an apparatus he helped run towards his own instrumental body. The writing is accordingly conceived as input for the microphonic system, its extended techniques generative rather than decorative—overtones varied through bow contact points, short impulse produced by maximal bow pressure with minimal motion, bowing on the tailpiece or behind the bridge (Fritsch 1968)—each producing the noise— and overtone-spectra the contact microphones disclose and the electronic players contribute to articulate. Writing and electroacoustic apparatus both live in a co-agency: this is particularly significant insofar as the writing assumes an idiomatic, soloistic character consonant with the historical musical form the work invokes. Yet the appropriation of both the violinistic language and the electroacoustic setup yields a more unified sonic field, as writing and apparatus converge in and through the violist's instrumental gesture. This convergence extends beyond the performative domain, becoming inscribed in the very form of the work. The five movements structure of Partita—Fantasia, Präludium, Fuge, Ciacona, and Fantasia finale—invoke the Baroque suite for solo strings, and with it the most codified stratum of the string tradition (Fritsch 1968)^{The allusion is to the tradition of the solo chaconne in general rather than to any particular work; the score contains no direct quotation.}. Fritsch runs an inherited musical form through the electronic apparatus of the Cologne studio. Appropriation therefore operates on two levels at once: an inherited electronic and acoustic lutherie corpus and an inherited musical form, bent towards a personal compositional end.

The score makes the stakes explicit: Fritsch describes it not as an exact determination of the sonic result, but as a Spielanweisung, within whose prescribed limits a maximum of mitkompositorisch—co-compositional—shaping is expected from the performers (Fritsch 1968).¹³ Agency in Partita thus resides neither in the composer, nor in the apparatus, nor in any single performer, but is distributed across the violist’s bodily knowledge, the operators’ co-compositional articulation of the electronic field, and the sedimentation of the Cologne studio tradition. The composer-appropriator is the figure who organises these components into a coherent work—not by inventing them, nor by passively assembling them, but by re-authoring their relations.

This position is not confined to a single work: it runs from the serial Duett für Bratsche (1961) for viola and stereo tape, through Partita, to the markedly more improvisatory Violectra (1971) for viola d’amore and live electronics, realised at the Feedback Studio in Cologne—which Fritsch co-founded—and built on the portable EMS Synthi A analogue synthesiser, realized by Peter Zinovieff. Even once he had helped establish an institution of his own, the devices remained ones he had not designed. Seen alongside Lupone and Saariaho, Fritsch’s position appears as a third, irreducible mode of engagement with technological apparatus. If Lupone composes the instrument and Saariaho integrates it, Fritsch re-authors it: the instrument, through this appropriation becomes, in a certain sense, singular and not neutral.

AUDIO: excerpt from Partita, Feedback Studio Köln CD 10.

5. COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES: STAMP, AFFORDANCE, AGENCY

Placed side by side, Lupone, Saariaho, and Fritsch reveal three ways in which electronic lutherie may shape compositional practice. The three cases clarify three distinct distributions of intention, affordance, and agency. In Lupone, the stamp of the creator is inscribed directly into the apparatus, which embodies compositional thought and draws modelling, processing, spatial behaviour, and instrumental gesture into a single technical-musical field: the instrument is, in a strong sense, composed. In Saariaho, that stamp resides in the selective and aesthetically precise integration of possibilities she did not conceive, integrated into a pre-existing instrumental imagination. Electronics are not the source of form, yet its use transform the work’s perceptual horizon and extend its timbral range. Here the instrument is not composed from scratch, but recontextualised within a refined perspective of listening. In Fritsch, the stamp emerges through appropriation: the apparatus is the standard electroacoustic setup of the Cologne studio of the mid-1960s, yet its configuration and calibration respect to the body of the viola—and its integration with the violist’s own instrumental knowledge—yields a result that no neutral redeployment of the same equipment could have produced. Here the instrument is neither simply designed nor simply used, but operationally re-authored.

The three models also imply different conceptions of agency: distributed through a system whose architecture has been shaped compositionally (Lupone); tied to the performer and the autonomy of instrumental writing, while electronics reshape perception and resonance (Saariaho); or emerging from a negotiation with tools that arrive already historically and technically coded, yet become singular through the way they are reoriented and inhabited (Fritsch).

Precisely because these are positions rather than fixed identities, a composer may occupy more than one and shift between them within a single trajectory. Fritsch himself illustrates how uneven such a shift can be: from 1970–71 he co-founded the Feedback Studio in Cologne and its associated publishing house, becoming a builder of infrastructure that other composers would in turn appropriate; yet at the level of devices he remained an appropriator, composing Violectra on a commercially available synthesiser. Founding a studio and designing an instrument are not the same gesture for sure. The categories proposed here are therefore not compartments into which œuvres are sorted but vectors of a relation, naming what a given work does with its apparatus rather than what a composer permanently is. Read this way, the framework becomes a tool for tracing movement—between building, integrating, and appropriating—and can be extended well beyond the three cases discussed here.

This bears directly on the resurgence of modular synthesisers, boutique hardware, reclaimed tape machines, and vintage test equipment that has marked the last decade, for the three positions are indifferent to period. A musician who designs a module and composes from within the constraints it imposes occupies the position of the composer-luthier as fully as Lupone did with the Fly10 or the Fly30 systems; one who integrates a commercially available system into a sonic imagination formed independently of it stands where Saariaho stands; one who reorients obsolete or repurposed apparatus towards purposes its makers did not foresee is doing, with different hardware, what Fritsch did with the equipment of the Cologne studio. This last is especially common in improvised practice, where the apparatus is negotiated in performance rather than composed for in advance. What the historical cases offer is not a precedent but a vocabulary: a way of asking, of any such practice, where authorship of the apparatus lies and what it is being asked to do.

The importance of these distinctions lies not in their classificatory rigidity, but in their capacity to illuminate how works organise relations between people, tools, and sonic processes. Electronic lutherie, in this broader sense, is not merely about objects. It is about relations, and about the ways those relations are shaped aesthetically (Bovermann et al. 2017).

6. CONCLUSION

Electronic lutherie in the repertoire for strings and electronics is not a single practice, nor can it be reduced to the construction of devices. It is better understood as a field in which compositional thought, instrumental gesture, technical design, and performative configuration intersect in different ways. Through the three figures discussed here, it becomes possible to distinguish situations in which the apparatus is generated as part of the compositional process, those in which it extends an already autonomous instrumental poetics, and those in which a historically situated technological ecology is appropriated so intensively that its re-authoring becomes a compositional strategy in itself.

Michelangelo Lupone, Kaija Saariaho, and Johannes Fritsch do not merely exemplify three individual approaches. Together, they make audible three different ways in which instruments may bear the stamp of their creators and participate in the redistribution of agency within artistic practice. Their comparison suggests that tools do not simply serve musical ideas. They help shape them, constrain them, and project them into specific forms of listening and performance.

A closing word on the position from which these categories are drawn. I write as a cellist who performs this repertoire and composes with live electronics, and from that vantage the three positions are not only analytical: they describe different things asked of the performer. Where the apparatus is composed, one enters a system whose parameters have already been shaped compositionally, and interpretation consists partly in learning what that system is listening for. Where it is integrated, instrumental autonomy is preserved and the decisive work is done at the mixing desk as much as on the strings. Where it is appropriated, the performer is drawn into co-authorship in real time, as Fritsch’s mitkompositorischinstruction states outright. In practice these are less alternatives to be chosen between than stations passed through within a single piece—which is, finally, the strongest argument for treating them as vectors rather than as categories.

For this reason, the repertoire for strings and electronics offers a privileged site from which to rethink electronic lutherie. It shows that instruments are never just supports for musical thought. They are themselves condensations of intention, history, affordance, and aesthetic possibility (Alperson 2008; Bovermann et al. 2017). To compose with them is always, in one way or another, also to compose them—whether by designing them, by integrating them into a personal poetics, or by appropriating and reorienting them from within an inherited technological ecology.

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Jenkins, B. 2014. Tensional Processes and Perception of Form in Three Selected Compositions by Kaija Saariaho. Master’s thesis, New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington.
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Acknowledgments

This research is part of the author's doctoral research programme: DREAM (Dottorato di Ricerca in Estetica Artistica Musicale), Conservatory of Music ‘Alfredo Casella’, L’Aquila, Italy.

Imprint

Author

Gabriele Boccio

Issues

Date

28 June 2026

Footnotes

1 A word on terminology, since the verb “use” can carry more than one sense. Three questions need separating. First, what is used: in Saariaho’s case a digital reverberation unit, a harmonizer and, in the later works, Max patches realised by others—that is, commercially or institutionally available processing, not instruments conceived for the work. Second, at what depth: she does not merely select these devices but configures them, prescribing reverberation time and wet amount in the score and, for the harmonizer, an exact programme and parameter set; what she does not do is conceive or build them. Third, whose relation to technology the term names: it is the composer’s relation to the apparatus, not an expectation that the performer become an operator—in this repertoire the performer remains an instrumentalist. “User” is therefore retained here in a restricted and specifiable sense: the composer who configures and integrates an apparatus she has not conceived. It is deliberately not retained for the third position, where “expert user” would import from ergonomics and human–computer interaction an emphasis on proficiency over authorship and would understate the transformative character of the engagement described below. “Appropriator” is preferred there.
2 A first version ran on Apple hardware in 1983, a second on IBM PC in 1985; the system was presented publicly at the V Colloquio d’Informatica Musicale, Mostra d’Oltremare, Naples, 1985.
3 The model gave control over the tension-to-density ratio of the string, friction coefficients, bow speed, bow pressure, and discrete bow contact points. On the underlying physical modelling see Palumbi and Seno’s work on bowed-string models developed at the CRM.
4 The trajectory continues in the family of “augmented instruments” Lupone designed at the CRM from 2000 onward—Feed-Drum, SkinAct, WindBack—and in the thread of the corda virtuale, the virtual string, which runs from the physical modelling of Corda di metallo to Canto di madre (1998) and to Linea fugace (2015), subtitled three variations on the virtual string.
5 ^{The score extends this calibration into the performance situation. The disposition, number and placement of loudspeakers, and the listening levels, are to be regulated in relation to the acoustic response of the venue, respecting the dynamic relations indicated in the score; the sound engineer tests and optimises timbral and dynamic balance at the points marked in the score’s legend, while the violinist is asked to stand away from the frontal axis and from areas of strong reflection, in places where the direct sound of the instrument predominates over the processed one (Lupone 1986).}
6
7 The score specifies settings should an SPX90 be used as harmonizer: programme 22 (pitch change B), with pitch1 +0 / fine1 +45 / delay1 20 ms, and pitch2 +0 / fine2 −50 / delay2 15 ms.
8 An analogous setup—digital reverberation and a multi-effects processor—returns some years later in Folía (1995) for double bass and live electronics, realised not at IRCAM- as the largest part of his works -but at GRAME in Lyon. The position described here does not depend on a single institutional apparatus: it characterises Saariaho’s relation to whatever apparatus is available.
9 The synthetic element was realised through resonant filters capable of operating in real time, on a MaxMSP patch developed at IRCAM, with the performance environment built by the technicians Xavier Colella and Jean-Baptiste Barrière. Barrière’s role recurs across the catalogue: he also realised the Max patches for Vent Nocturne and Frises, and the explanatory accounts of Saariaho’s electronic procedures adapted on the composer’s official site derive from his presentations in the CD-ROM Prisma (1999).
10 Frises is divided into four sections, each gathering a different idea of musical form around the common factor of the ostinato, and each identified by its own process, activated directly by the performer’s pedal; the whole sonic material derives from real-time transformations of the violin.
11 The work was premiered in Helsinki in April 1967 and later recorded at WDR in Cologne, with Fritsch on viola and Rolf Gehlhaar, Alfred Alings and Karlheinz Stockhausen operating the electronics (Fritsch 1968; Fritsch 2011). The score notes that after the première the work was performed in Oslo, Stockholm, London, Cologne, Darmstadt, Berlin and Vienna.
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13 One detail of the score makes the direction of fit unusually explicit. Fritsch observes that the Maihak W 49 filters used in the performances up to that point produced disturbing incidental noise whenever their settings were changed, and that at some points the movement of the faders written into the score had been adjusted to this behaviour; with improved filter types, he adds, the resulting stereotyped figure of decrescendo–filter change–crescendo should be avoided. The notation, in other words, accommodates the material defects of an apparatus the composer did not design.