Abstract Instruments, the exceptionally wierd or unusual.

The Trautonium needs a comeback (Oskar Sala forever!)

And of course one thing is acoustic instruments and sounds, another entire spectrum is electronic or electro-acoustic.

You can pretty much engineer just about any sound you want these days, and all the technology allows for total-manipulation of frequencies, etc etc.

So really, it surprises me that this isn't considered.

Me and a student at the Stuttgart Hochschule were discussing this topic once, and he said "Composers these days have no interest for electronic music. They prefer to stick to their violin and piano duos!" And I found it funny, as I had just written something for violin and piano, but we were talking because he was showing me around the old machinery such as synthesizers and stuff from the 60s and such.

All of it abandoned and gathering dust. Surely, working like the pioneers did in the 60s and earlier with electronic music is a labor of love more than anything. With weeks upon weeks of cutting tiny tapes and measuring, cutting again, pasting things together.

If music education wasn't so trend-oriented, certainly this should take up as much time as 1+1=2 harmony lessons or orchestration, as what one can learn from working with pure raw sound in such a form is priceless. These days we are lucky that computers that can do all this mindless processing came along, and it's a lot easier to work with synthesis of any type than it used to be.

But at the same time, maybe that's why nobody thinks about it much now. In essence, electronic music lives on in many types of popular/consumption music, and it seems really difficult to escape the presence of music that uses samplers and synthesizers.

One cannot equal both things however, since simply the use of the equipment and techniques doesn't mean the same motive.

And I really would advise looking seriously into electronic music and such as a means of learning that sound, or for that matter, music isn't just what comes out of a violin or a piano. There's millions of tiny parameters and variations that make instruments sound like they do, and learning about these things, the very nature of what a composer sets out to work with.

Though it is undoubtedly easier to write something for violin or piano than spend eight weeks defining one single waveform to sound like you want it to sound on a machine that takes up an entire room. But for some (like me) it has its charm.