KITTEN ON THE KEYS, OR KEYS ON THE KITTENS? ANYWAY, WHAT A HOWLING SUCCESS!

The cat-organ shown below in the old engraving is typical of several such drawings with cats and/or pigs being stuck with pins attacked to an organ keyboard, allegedly used in the old days at the Witches' Sabbaths and similar demoniacal events. Is this what the tiresome nasty Purists and Perfectionists mean when they demand that composers never use recordings or amplifiers or synthesizers or electronic apparatus, but perform only with live mew-sicians? Hmmm!

IVOR DARREG

(Letter written to EAR EAST magazine of New York, devoted to new and experimental music, concerning their Festival Issue of 1984--the Festival at Hartford CT.)

Greetings from Out West

Acknowledging the big Festival Issue of your magazine which arrived on Thursday the 12th. A number of interesting things I would like to comment on, so this has to be a long letter; hope you don't mind. Later on I will no doubt hear from some friends of mine in or near Connecticut and get more info about how the Festival went.

Coincidence: Glendale is to Los Angeles & Hollywood, as Hartford (the Festival) is to New York City: Glendale is now a financial center even though I am in the sub-basement underneath the Underground Fconomy on a Broken Shoestring.

Glendale is about the same size as Hartford: 140,000. From your magazine, Hartford is something of a cultural center; Glendale is a Cultural Desert except for an art and music library on the border with Burbank. All my friends and reputation are from elsewhere. So for that reason I am glad my 8-year exile here is ending.

(Change of address notice will be sent of course when and as.)

My experience with Festivals has been with smaller ones, such as those in San Diego where I demonstrated my instrumnts and compositions in new scales such as 17 19 22 and 31.

Let's comment first on Davey Wiliams' Improvisation article: in this age of premeditated dr-as-dust Serialism (Music In Cold Blood), I am grateful someone brings up improvisation as a needed antidote thereto. Besides 50 years of solo improvising, I have now and then been involved with duet and trio improvising. But very recently, a breakthrough: somebody let me have a Quad Sync tape machine and I was able to improvise layer by layer -- 4 cello parts, singing a quartet, 19- or 22-tone electric guitar, fretless banjo, whatever. 26 copies of this have been sent out and good comments have begun to come in. Easy on the eyes -- no notation to fool with; no performers imposed upon at all; no waiting till after my death to get things played. Fortunately again, I had the 4-track machine long enough to get something done.

This is extremely important -- when one is composing in non-12, whether just intonation or temperaments such as 19- or 31-tone, with the tape machine there is no need to train someone else to read new notations or rehearse in a scale they never heard before. That breaks the vicious circle and smashes to smithereens the horrid falsehoods about new tuning-systems, uttered by non-composers who want to take all the fun out of life and deny everybody the new musical resources of non-12 (xenharmonics).

Why this hatred of progress in music? It is exactly 60 years ago that I had my first piano lesson. Must I be chained to pianos all my born days?

I have built new instruments, as you already know. Now how will those using my instruments develop their full resources unless they improvise on them?

So that article will be helpful.

Now to the Scribing Sound article: I am glad the subject of Augenmusik was brought up -- music for your Eyes Only -- there's far too much of that stuff around. 54 years' accumulation of scores and parts and piano and other pieces mock me in dead silence from boxes and drawers -- many were lost, never returned by conductors or prospective performers, so that explains my love of tape and cassette machines. I am only one of thousands of composers who have been treated this way for decades. I wish it weren't so taboo to discuss the financial and practical aspects of composers being ordered to write everything down in advance, copy out parts, burn midnight oil, spend money they don't have, wait till after they are dead, and nobody performs or even rehearses the notation; they don't even respect it. Since I am a performer also, I do understand it costs money and time to rehearse and perform -- but is it realistic anymore to expect others to spend so much money and time presenting new scores? In the 19th century that was the only game in town, but in 1984?

In my teens and twenties, I wrote conservative pieces, but that availed nothing: no matter how easy they were to play, all I got was delays, excuses, alibis, evasions, cold shoulders, scoldings, and rejections. Paradoxically, I only get known when I do something very unusual and different and for the last 20 years, outside the 12-tone tuning. Conforming did not help at all! If you give in on your principles, or sell out, it's like blackmail -- they just demand more and never help you anyway.

That distinction made between pre-scriptive and post-scriptive notations in the second paragraph of the article is very interesting. I find myself now transcribing some of my tapes and notating them after the fact, not because I expect any performers other than myself to perform them, but to aid the listeners in following along and understanding the structure. If that gets somebody to perform later, well and good, but at age 67 I have to be mighty cynical about that! Also it takes care of those nasty mean cruel characters who impugn my musical literacy.

My personal prediction about the future of notation is that it will become entirely typewritable -- something like Computer Coding -- indeed, an OCR machine might be able to read it and have the computer play it. One thing inclining me to this opinion is the numbers-instead-of-noteheads system of Julian Carillo, who reduced his staff to one line, got rid of clefs and accidentals that pepper the page, and so no problem with his quarter-, eighth- and sixteenth-tones. Back in the 1940s the composer Adolph Weiss had an entirely typewritten notation that made sense.

The performance of one of his very difficult chamber works in this notation convinced me that typewritable music was a desirable goal.

By the way: the above notations are digital, and so is standard staff notation for the most part. However, actual performances on voice and violin are analog, and these graphic notations mentioned in the article have analog features. So the analog versus digital problem now occupying synthesizer and computer people so much, is highly relevant to the progress of music, and I would like to be somewhat involved.

I recently received account of a Music Notation Modernization Association being started by Thomas S. Reed (Box 241, Kirksville MO 63501) who publishes a newsletter about new notations -- mostly for 19th century music, though. I'm trying to modernize him.

Now to the Computer Art article: I don't feel so exclusive or down on amateurs as the authors seem to. I think the "hands-on" demos are very important -- to reduce that mathophobia that they discuss as well as the general fear of computers. One of my own efforts outside music was the Numaudo/Numalittera code for spoken and typewritten mathematics. The tie-in with music there was that I put the sol-fa syllables into working and business clothes.

They allude to the expensive large computer installations, where the money does not go to composers, but to the maintenance of the number-crunchers. However, the conventional orchestra and concert-hall have priced themselves way out of the market and I would never see enough money in my entire life to get that kind of orchestra performance, so what's new? Happily, the new small computers can do much more now, with proliferation of new software.

At the present moment, I am anxiously concerned about a dangerous trend in computer music: it is haunted by the piano's Ghost. There is no reason in the world why computer music has to stay in twelve-tone equal temperament, nor why computers or synthesizers or electronic musical instruments should be enslaved to mere carbon-copy imitation of the piano's wooden machinery. There will be no progress in music until new tunings are more easily available, and all a computer needs is the programming. Wally Holland and David Hill have helped me get my compositions performed on computer controlled synthesizers in new scales a year ago. So I have already benefited by these possibilities as actualized by those broadminded unprejudiced people.

Which leads, smoothly enough, to something in the article portion on p. 24 by Leigh Landy: Tonality: these pieces I did on their equipment were tonal. (I have done some free atonality in several scales, but not Serialism.) While tonality seemed to be exhausted and in articulo mortis with conventional instruments and the ordinary 12-tone equal temperament, there are many undiscovered new uses of tonality if you are willing to try such temperaments as 17 19 22 31, or just intonation on electronic instruments having more than 12 pitch-classes per octave. Or on refretted guitars or bowed strings following along. That is, it is possible to revive tonality. For that matter, to extend atonality also! Freed from the implications of atonality in 12-tone-no longer in 13 or 14 tone is it necessary to avoid consonant ch6rds when writing atonally or serially. Less stilted. I better stop there: the proof of the pudding you know -- a cassette will show better than hundreds of pages what I mean.

Sincerely

Ivor Darreg

The foregoing letter was printed in the November/December 1984 issue of EAR.

EAR is published by the New Wilderness Foundation, 325 Spring St, Rm. 208, New York NY 10013.

The Nov./Dec. '84 issue is entitled MUSIC AND SOUND IN HEALING and also contains reviews of the Festival in Hartford and of one of Johnny Reinhard's series of Microtonal Concerts in New York.

The theme of the many illustrations in this issue of the magazine seems to be along the lines of what Harry Partch called Corporeality.

One might raise a question here: The noisy contemporary environment, and the jillions of radio and TV commercials, coupled with universal background music in commercial establishments coming from Automatic Distraction Machines, may be neutralizing or cancelling out beneficial effects which these music therapists are trying to achieve. In that sense, the cards are unfairly stacked against them!