Richard Tognetti switches on strings with a new composition for electric violin

RICHARD Tognetti is about to lift the roof in concert halls across the nation with Brett Dean's new composition for electric violin.

Violectra

IT is a violin, but not as we know it: elegant in its own way but as alien to its acoustic cousin as the Fender Stratocaster is to the flamenco guitar.

Conductor and composer Brett Dean has scored for the electric violin before and has improvised with Australian Chamber Orchestra artistic director Richard Tognetti for years, but never has the instrument been worked so hard for an Australian audience as it will be tonight in Canberra's Llewellyn Hall.

We have known Dean and Tognetti long enough to know they rarely stick to the rules; nevertheless the thought is irresistible: perhaps this time, with the Australian debut of Electric Preludes, the pair will go too far.

For Dean, who crossed the electric threshold in his 2010 opera Bliss, digital technology opens a world of infinite possibility. "Instruments have never stopped evolving," Dean tells Review. "If you were going to be a total purist as a composer, you would write for nothing except the human voice."

It's a plausible excuse, but there is something particularly startling about the act of plugging a solid lump of wood into an amplifier or, in this case, a computer. When Les Paul appeared on stage in the 1930s with "the log", a guitar fashioned from a piece of 4 x 4 timber, he disguised it inside the body of a familiar semi-acoustic instrument so as not to startle the audience. In the background of the recording of Bob Dylan's second set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when he cranks up the amplifiers and lets rip with Maggie's Farm, there is the distinct sound of booing. Few who grew up in the 60s could listen to the opening chords of the Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar even today without feeling their parents wouldn't approve.

"Well I'm obviously not a purist," Dean replies. "Having said that, I'm acutely aware of the special properties of acoustic music, that can never be replicated. But as a composer, the opportunity to take the music into a new sound world that wouldn't normally be available is enormously enticing."

The electric violin has been around for almost 90 years; jazz musician Stuff Smith was experimenting with one as early as the 1920s, and by the time American George Beauchamp in 1936 filed the first patent for an instrument fashioned from Bakelite, it was clear that amplification did not just augment sound, it changed it into something different altogether. Cautiously, Beauchamp wrote his patent not for the electric violin as such, but for "electrical musical instruments of the violin type".

By then jazz guitarist and exponents of the new genre of electric blues, like Paul, were discovering new tricks. The solid instrument could sustain a note far longer; the vibrations are not dissipated in a chamber but enhanced like a tuning fork applied to a table. The strings, and even the neck, could be bent, sometimes with a tremolo arm, to produce novel sounds; the fret board could be tapped with both hands; feedback and distortion could be tamed to become the artist's friend.

It granted the ability to amplify not just vibrating strings but the deep, and sometimes ugly, stirrings of the soul; the same technology that gave birth to the dreamy slide guitar of Hawaiian music also empowered the nihilism of Jimi Hendrix, who would gnaw on his Strat with his teeth one moment and set fire to it the next.

Such is the ability to magnify the deeper recesses of humanity that one is grateful in a way that the electric violin was not available to earlier composers. Sibelius's Tapiola for electric orchestra would have been 20 minutes of sheer terror; those who heard it would have emerged visibly shaking, as white-faced as the audience at the opening night of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. The violin in Shostakovich's Elegy would not have been crying to itself, it would have been sobbing uncontrollably; concert hall cleaners would have needed heavy-duty mops later to deal with the blubbery, tear-stained mess.

Dean is relishing his newfound powers: "It gives the ability to combine virtuosity with a whole new vista of sonic characteristics. The possibilities are endless. They're limited only by the technology and the imagination for what we can do with those sounds."

The written range of the solid-bodied violin can be extended with the addition of extra strings since, unlike the delicate light-timbered version, it is not limited to four.

Tognetti modestly stopped at six, but it can do the work of a viola and cover much of the range of the cello. The instrument's maker, David Bruce Johnson, adds a seventh or even an eighth to some of his instruments. The E flat looks sturdy enough to moor an ocean liner and could, with some muscular bow work, perform some of the lighter tasks of the bass.

Johnson works with European maple, and sometimes sycamore, cedar or poplar that arrives in huge boards at his workshop in Birmingham in the English West Midlands.

The task from there is to pare back the weight to less than 400g, the maximum a violinist's shoulders and neck can reasonably be expected to support. The bridge, crafted from solid maple with hardwood plates, incorporates a pressure-sensing piezo pickup of his own design.

Johnson, a craftsman and pioneer of the modern instrument, was inspired in the 80s when he came across a practice violin from the Victorian era, with a skeletal structure in place of a conventional hollow chamber. At a time when electric folk music was undergoing a renaissance, and when transducer and amplification technology was moving apace, the electric violin's moment had finally arrived.

Johnson's Violectra company is now 20 years old. Happy owners of his bespoke instruments include violinist Nigel Kennedy, who last year recovered two $40,000 instruments stolen after an appearance in The Cavern in Liverpool in 2005. There was no mistaking them when they turned up for auction last year after a dealer had picked them up for $30 each; fortunately, they had been decked at Kennedy's request in claret and blue, the colours of his football team, Aston Villa.

No two Violectras are the same. Tognetti's instrument is made of maple, the density of the wood producing a richer and more intense sound than that of poplar or other alternative woods. American classical violinist Leila Josefowicz, who like Tognetti is an aficionado of the Guarneri del Gesu, asked Johnson to include the Guarneri's distinctive flowering scroll. Davide Rossi, the Italian who contributed much to the distinctive sound of Coldplay's album Viva la Vida, plays a five-string jet-black viola. The glamorous Escala Quartet reached the finals of Britain's Got Talent in 2008 playing instruments with a metallic silver finish.

Handcrafted instruments take time: typically Johnson makes only a few each year, each one a work of art in its own right. The relationship between soloist and maker is a close one. "You think you've finished your work when you hand it over," he tells Review, "and then someone like Richard Tognetti takes it to another level."

Dean's Electric Preludes evolved further in rehearsals as he, Tognetti and sound designer Bob Scott discovered new tricks. In an echo of Dean's 2006 work for violin and orchestra, The Lost Art of Letter Writing, the six preludes are played together.

The arpeggios in the first prelude, Abandoned Playground, summon haunting images of derelict space. The inspiration for the second, Topography, was an exhibition of Western Desert art featuring the work of artist Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri at the National Gallery of Victoria early last year. It begins with Tognetti blowing across the strings, as a flautist blows across a reed, a technique discovered by accident during rehearsals in old Slovenian cinema for the piece's international debut in that country at the Maribor Festival last year.

While the novel manner of playing is made possible by the Violectra's extraordinary sensitivity, Scott says amplification is not high on the list of features he and Tognetti will be exploiting. He says amplification gives the instrument greater presence, abbreviating the distance between audience and performer, but cranking up the sound simply increases the difficulty of maintaining balance with the rest of the orchestra.

In a world of ubiquitous loudspeakers, the classical concert hall as it was once imagined, where electricity powers nothing more than a light bulb, is a sanctuary of acoustic purity. For this performance, however, the entire ACO will be amplified. Subtle "enhancement", as it is euphemistically known, is already used more frequently in concert halls than many audiences are aware. "When it's good the audience doesn't notice it," says Scott.

For Scott, who worked with Dean on Bliss, the new piece is especially challenging; the frequent changes of sound and maintaining the balance with the rest of the orchestra require a virtuosity of its own. Dean says: "It's a bit like a double concerto in that sense. I think Bob was both as anxious and exalted as Richard was on the opening night."

Scott, in turn, pays tribute to Dean, who will be conducting. "It's a cracker of a piece," he says.

For the reassurance of traditionalists, Electric Preludes will be bookended by Haydn's La Passione and two familiar Mozart pieces. For these Tognetti will rely on his del Gesu; whatever sound emerges will be his alone, uncomplicated by digital artifice.

For it is a comforting fact that while we are capable today of digital tricks Mozart's first audiences would have mistaken for alchemy, the sound of a Guarneri or a Stradivarius cannot be reproduced in anything but an inexact form. It may be the wood or the glue, who knows; let us hope we never find out.

Richard Tognetti plays Electric Preludes at the launch of the ACO's 2013 season in Canberra on February 2, and then in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney.