It was there in his attic lab that Harald built the first European post-war electronic instrument, the 1947 version of the Melochord. He moved from Berlin with his new wife Irmgard to the small village Neubeuern in the Alps of southern Germany, where his first son Ralf was born. Harald worked on projects for submarine sound and wireless communication. I praise myself lucky, that I was able to go to the electronic industry« (Harald Bode, 1957). The year 1939 arrived and as Harald put it »we had the only choice in Germany, to go to military service or do work for the government. It was during this period that Harald decided electronic musical instruments would be »the task of my life time« (Harald Bode, 1957) but this task was to be put on hold. The instrument was used extensively in film scores of the period, where it often supplied a moody melody line. During this time along with collaborators Oskar Vierling and Fekko von Ompteda, Harald developed his own instrument, the Melodium, a monophonic melody instrument with touch-sensitive keyboard and multi-timbre capability.īeing a monophonic instrument the Melodium would present far fewer tuning problems than the Warbo-Formant Organ. There he worked on an electromechanical instrument similar to the Hammond, but exceeding it both technically and in performance. In early spring of 1938, following his success with the Warbo-Formant Organ, Harald moved to Berlin and did postgraduate study at the Heinrich Hertz Institute. The instrument was polyphonic, most remarkable for the period, made sound completely by electronic means and could create new sounds freely by adjusting its half-rotary and stop knobs. It was a radical design, a formant type organ with a special circuit, in which four tone generators could generate the sounds for the entire 44-key keyboard. In 1937, with funding support provided by Christian Warnke, Harald created the Warbo-Formant Organ. It was in 1935 that Harald began his work in the field of electronic music instruments. Harald worked and put himself through university studying mathematics, physics and natural philosophy and graduated from Hamburg University in 1934. At the young age of 18 Harald’s life took a drastic shift: he lost both parents and went to live with his elderly great aunt. This vision would become the æsthetic drive behind his electronic music instrument designs. I had always the desire to create the means to express myself in a new way (musically)… to bring about sounds, which I visualized… sounds which I thought would be possible. Young Harald was intrigued by the possibilities of both physics and music. His father Maximillion Bode taught and played pipe organ, while his mother Dagmar played the harpsichord. He grew up in a home surrounded by love and music. Harald Bode was born 1909 in the bustling port city of Hamburg, Germany.
Estey organ studio model specifications archive#
Year of birth, place 1909, Hamburg, Germany Year of death, place 1987, New York, United States Role at the ZKM Artist of the archive Biography
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