Bernard Szajner

Bernard Szajner, the French composer, visual artist and inventor of the laser harp, died on 21 September 2026 at the age of 82. He was one of the more singular figures to emerge from the European avant-garde electronic music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a self-taught experimenter who moved between recording studios, concert lighting rigs and, later in life, digital and theatrical art.

Szajner was born in Grenoble on 27 June 1944 to a family of Polish Jews who had fled Nazi persecution. He spent part of his early childhood in hiding, and the loss of an uncle who was sent to Auschwitz and never returned left a mark that later surfaced in the darker, more political themes of his music. He came to composition and performance from an unconventional route, first making his name in the 1970s as a lighting and visual effects designer for acts including Magma, Gong, Stomu Yamashta and The Who, and for commercial clients such as Cartier and Renault.

His most lasting technical contribution was the laser harp, an instrument he developed and patented around 1980 after being inspired by Samuel R. Delany's science fiction novel Nova. The device let a performer produce sound by breaking beams of laser light, a striking piece of stagecraft as much as an instrument. It was later adopted and popularised by Jean-Michel Jarre, who commissioned a version from Szajner for a tour of China, giving the invention a far wider public profile than its creator ever sought for himself. Szajner was reportedly ambivalent about this fame, wary that the laser harp would overshadow the composed music it was built to serve.

Between 1979 and 1983 he released five albums of adventurous electronic music, beginning with Visions of Dune, an instrumental response to Frank Herbert's novel, and continuing through Some Deaths Take Forever, Superficial Music and Brute Reason, among others. These records were only modestly known at the time but have since found a dedicated following among collectors and electronic music historians, discussed at length on sites such as Discogs. By the end of the 1980s Szajner had grown disillusioned with the music business and stepped away from it almost entirely, redirecting his energy into digital art and theatre for the next two decades, before returning occasionally to performance in later years, including collaborative concerts in 2012 and 2013.

News of his death was reported by outlets including Resident Advisor, whose headline described him as a French electronic musician and composer who had died at 82. No cause of death has been made public. Tributes have focused on his role as a quietly influential inventor and composer whose laser harp became one of the more recognisable pieces of stagecraft in electronic music history, even as he himself preferred to be remembered for his compositions.