Villa-Lobos goes electric!

In this 1957 photo from the Museu Villa-Lobos photo archive, Heitor Villa-Lobos demonstrates a "Pio instrument." I'm not at all sure what this instrument is, and I would appreciate help from readers of The Villa-Lobos Magazine. Is is some sort of wire with an electro-acoustic pickup, using a Pio capacitor? Is Villa-Lobos dabbling with the same infernal electronica that got Bob Dylan into so much trouble at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965?

Villa-Lobos mostrando o instrumento ‘Pio’

Villa-Lobos has a long history of innovative instrumentation, going back to Amazonas in 1917. This large orchestral work calls for both a violinophone and a sarrusophone, still rarely used at the time.

In a review of a 1930 concert conducted by Villa-Lobos, Mario de Andrade mentions Villa's innovative use of a violinophone in Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 1, rather than the violino piccolo Bach asked for, tuned a minor third or fourth higher than a regular violin. This is hardly Historically Informed Practice by today's standards, but Andrade was impressed: "The effect was very curious, especially the timbre in the second movement, marrying admirably the timbre of the violinophone with that of certain wind instruments."

Violí Stroh = Violinophone (ca. 1900)
Compagnie française du gramophone. Museo de la Música de Balcelona

In 1945 The New Yorker reported on Villa-Lobos's use of "piano stuffers" onstage in Choros no. 8, at a Philharmonic-Symphony concert conducted by Artur Rodzinski. This was written in 1925, so Villa-Lobos was well ahead of John Cage in the use of a Prepared Piano.

When Villa-Lobos attended the 1939 World's Fair in New York, he must have been impressed with the new Hammond Novachord, the world's first commercial polyphonic synthesizer, which was demonstrated there. In 1945 one of these amazing instruments must have made its way to Rio de Janeiro, since Villa used it in three scores from that year: Madona, the Seventh Symphony, and the Fantasia for Cello & Orchestra. Watch this wonderful performance of Madona; you'll see three keyboard instruments: a piano, a celesta and, a novachord?

In his orchestral score Ruda: Song of Love, written for La Scala in 1951, Villa-Lobos calls for a "solovox". This is an electronic organ manufactured by Hammond in the 1940s.  Villa-Lobos also used a solovox in his opera Yerma, from 1955, The Emperor Jones ballet in 1956, and his late masterpiece from 1958, Floresta do Amazonas, which I wrote about yesterday. Speaking of which, there's a photograph from the recording of that work in New York in late 1958 that shows an instrument with a second small keyboard underneath the main keyboard. This looks a lot like a solovox!

Check out the instrument at the top left, with two rows of keys. A solovox?

Here's an example of a solovox to compare. When it comes time to record, you can only use the instruments that are available!