By: Rénald Fortier
Ingenium – Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation
The melodious saga of two French pioneers of electronic music who deserve to be better known: Joseph Armand Marie Givelet and Édouard Éloy Coupleux
Oct 9, 2022
Media
Louis Victor Jules Vierne (3rd from left), organist of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral playing a Coupleux Givelet wave organ, Poste Parisien radio station. Anon., “L’orgue des ondes du ‘Poste parisien’ est inauguré.” Le Petit Parisien, 27 October 1932, 1.
Yours truly must hereby and heretofore apologise for not having written, last month, any text directly involving the activities of the Canada Science and Technology Museum, in Ottawa, Ontario, a sister / brother institution of the dazzling Canada Aviation and Space Museum, also in Ottawa. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Speaking (typing?) of fault, I also have a confession to make, my reading friend. To my great shame, I must admit that I do not have an ear for music. In my distant youth, when pterosaurs roamed the skies of my homecity of Sherbrooke, Québec (Hello, SB, EG, and EP!), music was part of the elementary school curriculum. Teachers of infinite patience taught the use of the flute.
Yours truly never really mastered the use of the instrument in question, an inexpensive plastic flute, please note. The discordant sounds I produced made the glasses and plates vibrate in the cupboards of the family apartment. Yes, yes, it is true. My poor parents bravely resisted their urge to burst out laughing, especially when I asked them if I was making progress. A more Sheldonian moment could not be imagined, but back to our story. Err, actually, let us begin our story.
As you may imagine, broaching a subject of a musical nature here below takes me a tad out of my comfort zone. So, let us take our courage in both hands, and a portable keyboard in the other.
If you do not mind, I would like to begin our story in 1865, with the foundation, in Tourcoing, France, very close to the Franco-Belgian border, of a small watchmaking workshop, by Pierre Coupleux. When the latter died, in 1900 or 1904, I think, his sons, still in their twenties, Paul, Éloy and Léon, took over the business, renamed Coupleux Frères (Société à responsabilité limitée?).
Having deepened its knowledge, the trio gradually diversified its production, adding to it music boxes, optical illusion devices, phonographs, pianos, etc. A second store opened in 1908, in Lille, the region’s major city.
It should be noted that, around 1900-02, Coupleux Frères became the French depositary of the Pianola mechanical pianos of Aeolian Company, a well-known American firm. Yours truly believes that a good part of the instruments sold in France was in fact manufactured under license by the French firm. Anyway, let us move on.
The First World War dealt a terrible blow to the region of Tourcoing and Lille, occupied by the troops of the German Empire between October 1914 and October 1918. At the end of the conflict, the region was devastated. A large part of the Coupleux Frères facilities equally so.
Ironically, the ravages of war on both the French and Belgian sides of the border turned into a business opportunity for Coupleux Frères. With most of the churches in these regions damaged or destroyed, it was not long before the firm was inundated with orders for its pipe organs.
In a completely different vein, allow me to note here that the Coupleux brothers inaugurated their own radio station, Radio Flandres, in Lille, in 1923.
And it would probably be time to introduce the two main characters of our story of today.
Édouard Éloy Coupleux was born in 1876 in Tourcoing. Having abandoned his studies around 1891, at the age of 15, he began to work in his father’s workshop where both discovered that the young man had a real mechanical talent. That self-taught engineer actually designed several audio reproduction machines. In 1922 at the latest, for example, Coupleux Frères (successfully?) commercialised one of these inventions, the Télépiano, which amplified and remotely reproduced, via telephone wires if need be, the music played by a piano, or orchestra.
Indeed, it was that interest, not to say that obsession, for audio reproduction which led Coupleux, then a fairly well-known organ maker, to cross paths with a brilliant engineer, in 1927.
A recognised authority on radiotelegraphy / wireless telegraphy, in other words on radio, Joseph Armand Marie Givelet was born in July 1889, in Reims, France. It was during the First World War, when he was an engineer in the Armée de Terre, that Givelet discovered a passion for radiotelegraphy. Would you believe that he was one of the founders of the École centrale de TSF and of the Radio-Club de France, in 1919 and 1920? Indeed, he may very well have been the founding vice-president of the latter, but back to our story.
And yes, TSF means télégraphie sans fil, or wireless telegraphy.
In 1927, Givelet designed a monophonic electronic organ, the clavier à lampes / clavier muet / piano automatique radio-électrique, in English mute keyboard / tube keyboard / radio-electric automatic piano, which was presented to the public for the first time, in June, at the Palais du Trocadéro, in Paris, France. He presented a second prototype of that instrument able to play only one note at a time in December, at the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées, in Paris, as part of the first Salon des sciences et des arts.
Incidentally, the Palais du Trocadéro had been built as a large exhibition area for the Exposition universelle de 1878. In turn, the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées had been built as a large exhibition area for the Exposition universelle de 1900. Both buildings were later used as museum spaces, but I digress. A little.
Givelet may, I repeat may, have designed his monophonic electronic organs in part in order to broadcast music from the powerful radio transmitter of the Eiffel Tower without having to fear the distortions caused by the poor quality of the microphones of the time.
In any event, Givelet and Coupleux met in 1927 and decided to cooperate in order to design and commercialise a popular electronic organ intended for churches, cinemas and concert halls. The first brought to that union a solid technical knowledge. The second, on the other hand, had an equally solid knowledge of music and instrument making.
Both were aware that various people had made various types of electronic musical instruments. One only had to think of Lev Sergeyevich Termen, a brilliant Soviet engineer, inventor and musician better known as Leon Theremin. Yes, that Theremin, the inventor, around 1919-20, of the theremin, or ætherphone / etherphone / termenvox / thereminophone / thereminvox, one of the first electronic musical instruments and the first to be mass-produced. Termen / Theremin, you will recall, was mentioned in an April 2022 issue of our blog / bulletin / thingee, but back to our story.
Initially, in 1929, Givelet and Coupleux produced a kind of electronic mechanical piano which could reproduce the sounds emitted by string instruments (cello, double bass, viola, violin). Presented in November at the Congrès national de la radiodiffusion in Paris, the instrument did not go unnoticed.
The much more efficient instrument subsequently produced by our dynamic duo, a polyphonic instrument of almost infinite flexibility, was the Coupleux Givelet orgue à lampes / orgue des ondes / orgue électronique des ondes / orgue radio-électrique, in English electronic wave organ / radio-electric organ / tube organ / wave organ, an instrument without pipes, blower or air box whose keyboard and pedals would not faze any organist. An instrument which may very well have been the first successful electronic organ in the world.
Givelet and Coupleux may, I repeat may, have created Musique électro-synthétique Société à responsabilité limitée around the beginning of the 1930s in order to commercialise the wave organ.
The members of the prestigious Académie des Sciences, one of the 5 academies of the equally prestigious Institut de France, attended a demonstration of a proof of concept prototype in Paris, in October 1930, which left them amazed – in French émerveillés.
Émerveillés masculine plural of course, the first woman elected to the Académie des Sciences, the French mathematician and physicist Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, having been elected only in… May 1979 – barely 312 years, 5 months and 8 days, but who is counting, after its creation, in December 1666. The mind boggles.
Would you believe that the members of that institution refused, during a vote held in January 1911, to accept in their ranks a French chemist and physicist of Polish origin, Marie Curie, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, who had shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with her spouse, the French physicist Pierre Curie, and Antoine Henri Becquerel, another French physicist. The mind boggles. Squared.
Worse still, the proposal for said prize transmitted by the Académie des Sciences only contained the names of Becquerel and Pierre Curie. A member of the Svenska Akademien, the royal Swedish academy which awarded / awards the Nobel Prizes, having expressed himself on that subject within earshot of someone, Curie, furious, demanded that the name of his spouse be added to the proposal.
That academy, what a real beaut. And not misogynistic or xenophobic for two cents. Nay. But back to our story.
Would you believe that it was under the instigation of General Gustave Auguste Ferrié, member of the Académie des Sciences since 1922, that Coupleux and Givelet were invited to present their instrument? That world-famous engineer and broadcasting pioneer was mentioned in a September 1922 issue of our blog / bulletin / thingee – as if you did not know.
Said October 1930 presentation was mentioned, admittedly a tad late, in a June 1931 issue of the one and only French-language daily in Ottawa, Ontario. In fact, Le Droit reproduced a text published in October 1930 by the famous French illustrated weekly L’Illustration.
Coupleux and Givelet were convinced that their creation had a bright future. In many ways it was indeed superior to the pipe organ. The wave organ occupied less space on the gallery of a church than such an instrument. It virtually never went out of tune and hardly needed maintenance. A wave organ and its loudspeakers also cost a lot less and could be installed much faster. Those same loudspeakers, more or less numerous or more or less powerful, could be placed almost anywhere, at varying distances.
While the wave organ did not produce the long resonances to which the crowds who took part in religious services in large cathedrals were accustomed to, a distancing of a part of the loudspeakers could create a certain echo effect.
The Coupleux-Givelet wave organ of the Saint-Louis church in Villemomble, France. Édouard Éloy Coupleux stood next to abbot Alcide Deschamps, at the keyboard. Anon., “Une nouvelle invention dans le domaine musical.” Grand Écho du Nord de la France, 30 November 1931, 1.
The first commercial (288 triode tubes?) wave organ was inaugurated in December 1931, in the Saint-Louis church of the town of Villemomble, not far from Paris. The organist at the keyboard was the great Charles Arnould Tournemire, renowned composer, improviser and organist of the Sainte-Clothilde basilica in Paris. The media impact of that instrument remained limited, however, even though the church in question was a tad unorthodox: building with an internal metal structure (1901) and bell tower in reinforced cement (1926).
A hand-picked audience sat in the brand new auditorium of the private radio station Poste Parisien in Paris, then owned by the Compagnie générale d’énergie radio-électrique Poste Parisien, founded by the manager of a major daily Paris, Le Petit Parisien, to attend the inauguration of a more sophisticated (400 triode tubes?) and otherwise better known wave organ in October 1932. The much appreciated Louis Victor Jules Vierne, composer and holder of the great organs of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, was at the keyboard.
Would you believe that the wave organ was talked about across the Atlantic Ocean? The major daily La Presse of Montréal, Québec, published a text by its music columnist and critic, Marcel Valois, born Joseph Henri Jean Dufresne, in June 1932. In March 1933, a newspaper published 8 or 9 times a month, Le Bien Public of Trois-Rivières, Québec, published a recent text from the French monthly La Petite Maîtrise, a religious music magazine.
The development of the wave organ was deemed so important that Coupleux Frères and Givelet received, around May 1933, the Grand Prix du Président de la République awarded within the framework of the Concours d’inventions of the Foire de Paris, a competition organised annually by the Société des savants et inventeurs de France.
Coupleux and Givelet completed, no later than December 1932, the development of a piano-organ which allowed a single person to simultaneously control a piano and an electronic organ, or just one of these instruments, from a single keyboard. Yours truly does not know if that instrument was commercialised.
As advanced as it was, the electronic organ was not commercially successful. Apart from that of the Poste Parisien, just 4 of these very complex instruments seem to have been installed in French religious buildings, including the Notre Dame de la Treille cathedral, in Lille, in 1934.
That commercial failure, combined with the economic crisis of the 1930s, dealt a fatal blow to the manufacturing activities of Coupleux Frères. These ended in 1935. The Lille store, the only survivor of the adventure it seemed, remained in business until 1997.
It must be admitted that the introduction on the market, in June 1935, of the Hammond Model A electric organ, an instrument manufactured by Hammond Clock Company, a firm quickly renamed Hammond Organ Company, proved to be far more successful. Its American designers, Laurens Hammond and John M. Hanert, both of them watchmakers by the way, seemingly designed that relatively inexpensive and space-saving musical instrument to serve religious needs. Indeed, more than 1 750 churches around the world had apparently purchased a Hammond organ even before the mid-1940s. The rest is history.
A brief digression if I may. In 1954 at the latest, the manager or owner of a supermarket in Owensboro, Kentucky, Robert Brabant, installed a Hammond organ in his establishment so that his customers could shop to the sound of music. Within a few weeks, his sales increased by 20%, it was said. End of digression.
Yours truly must admit that I did not find much information on the subsequent careers of Coupleux and Givelet. The later assumed the scientific direction of the Institut international du son founded in Paris in March 1949, for example. He also taught at the aforementioned École centrale de TSF during the 1950s. Givelet died in November 1963, at the age of 74.
Édouard Éloy Coupleux, on the other hand, left our world in 1957, at the age of about 81.
This writer wishes to thank all the people who provided information. Any mistake contained in this article is my fault, not theirs.
Rénald Fortier
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