Oskar Sala

Oskar Sala (July 18, 1910, Greiz, Germany - February 26, 2002, Berlin) was one of the most innovative composers in the history of electronic music. His unique instrument, the Mixtur-Trautonium, was first introduced to the public in 1952 and soon received international licenses. Its massive architecture remains so unique that no one can reproduce the instrument nor interpret any of his compositions.

Oskar Sala had been a pupil of Friedrich Trautwein, the inventor of the Trautonium. But physicist Sala studied music with Paul Hindemith in 1930 at the Berlin conservatory and played his compositions for Trautonium. Early on with Trautwein, he composed pieces for Trautonium and performed them with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Carl Schuricht in 1940.

From the 1940s, Sala dedicated himself to film scoring and refined numerous classics. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was unsuccessfully searching for an acoustic environment for eerie scenes in The Birds (1963) until Sala convinced him to use his Trautonium-generated sound-effects.

In 2000, Peter Badge authored a bilingual, German and English biography, Oskar Sala - Pionier Der Elektronischen Musik, with many photos of Sala, the Trautonium, newspaper articles, a filmography, etc. It also includes a 73:39-minute CD-ROM / AUDIO CD. Promotional video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWta-WQRIjY