DUET OR DUEL?

(1990)

Fifty-five years ago, 1935, I was living in San Francisco and visited a number of music stores. At two of these I found pianos that were approximately a quarter-tone apart from one another. I tried the effect, since I had been curious about quartertones from boyhood--they were mentioned here and there, and once at age 11 I visited my cousin and retuned her ukulele so that each pair of similar strings would be a quartertone apart. This drove my sister bonkers even though there was no such word then!

Recently I heard about a planned concert on the East Coast which will feature works by three--and possibly four--composers written for two pianos tuned a quartertone apart. After my disappointing experience is San Francisco 55 years ago and a good many more since, and after accumulating 50 years' experience tuning pianos and organs and harmoniums, and after composing hundreds of pieces some of which happen to be in the quartertone system, I still do not think two pianos, one of which is a quartertone lower than the other, or higher if you insist on looking at them that way (Is the glass half full or is it half empty?) are suitable for performances in quartertones. I have written on this subject several times.

In the past, this use of two pianos might have been necessary, but it is now quite needless. We have all kinds of electronic keyboards, many of which can be retuned. Some of them have a built-in quartertone remapping, such that the 61 keys for 5 octaves of semitones (this is the standard manual keyboard scheme for organs) can become 2-1/2 octaves of quartertones at the touch of a button. Even if you can't get one of those, almost always two synthesizers can be stacked one of top of the other so that one performer can reach both easily and have 5 octave of quartertones.

Only one player required, not two. No tuning by ear needed either. Portable keyboards--no need to call in the piano movers, and then the piano tuner at the destination. Since piano prices have now gone through the roof while electronic keyboard prices have come down, the crossover occurred quite some time ago. When you add in the cost of tuning pianos and that of moving pianos to and from the concert hall, the financial advantage of the portable electronic keyboard is overwhelming.

In recent years there is another financial consideration: the cost of floor space to put pianos, and the tremendous increase in cost of rehearsal spaces.

No wonder the quartertone piano experimentation of the Nineteen-Twenties died out. But the foregoing is not the only reason why. As the Nineteenth Century went on,t he timbre of pianos changed, so much so that now the purists and those who insist upon Authentic Performances of Mozart and his contemporaries have revived the piano of that period, giving it the alternative name fortepiano to call attention to the very real difference in tone-quality. Strings were thinner; hammers were different; frames were wood instead of heavy cast iron. Weaker fundamental and stronger high harmonics. The thicker strings and higher tension and duller tone from heavily-felted hammers which evolved during the Romantic Period to compete with the orchestra and fill the ever-larger concert-halls of the late 19th Century, were wonderful for Tchaikovsky or Schumann or other Romantics, but by the same token, further and further from the precision and clarity of the harpsichord era. The effect was to blur and fail to define the unique chords and intervals of the quartertone system.

Today, of course, the harpsichord is back,having at least some revenge. And the boom in guitars also reconditions the Public Ear to brighter timbres. The piano has enjoyed a 200-year Time Slot, which should be enough for anybody.

Very well, the piano is not suitable for quartertones because fo the tone-quality ruining the novel effects of such intervals as the subminor third, the subminor seventh, the neutral third, and the semiaugmented fourth.

Furthermore, when TWO separate pianos are involved in playing chords containing those intervals, one note is on one piano and the other one (or two in the case of a triad) are on the other piano which has a separate soundboard not connected in any way to the first soundboard on the first piano. No chance for one piano to resound to the other! The sympathetic vibration situation occurring when one uses the damper pedal, which si the main reason for having pianos at all, is almost totally absent when, and ONLY when, quartertone intervals and chords are sounded. Outrageous discrimination against the very things the composer wants to convey to the audience.

Now suppose you want to write a quartertone melody. You have two players. They have to sound like one pianist. Too much to ask. To have legato melodies smoothly proceed by quartertones or three-quarter-tones? To have every complicated chord struck smartly together, dead-on? Do you realize how much rehearsal that would take?

Okay, no suppose that you are brave enough to attempt to play two pianos at once so that you could at least strike all the notes legate or strike chords exactly together. That still isn't good enough. The reason is that in most cases no two pianos are even exactly alike, and the beat-up used pianos that generally would be available today, have different-enough timbres so that every passage from one piano to the other sticks out like a Sore Thumb. I found that out in the piano store in San Francisco way back in dear old 1935. Why is this information not available to you? Because two-piano music, is for pianos tuned together, not a quartertone apart. Those problems therefore do not arise. It might be an advantage for the two pianos to sound different and stand out one from the other.

Back in the 20s special twin pianos were built for quartertones. It you were a Piano Mover, that would be a real nasty nightmare. If you were a tuner, it should still be quite a headache. They had to cost more than two separate pianos since they were so nonstandard. It was very difficult to span two keyboards when they had to be farther apart than the two manuals of an organ. (Mechanical reasons having to do with piano actions and necessary sturdiness of keys and heavy frames.)

So while that did solve the sympathetic-vibration-with-the-damper-pedal problem, the remedy was just as bad as the disease. Would you dare move such a monster into your apartment or condo?

This sort of hassle was the Only Game In Town for a century or more. But not now. The many solutions to the problem are available much cheaper than any two pianos. Than any one piano for that matter. There is just no excuse for doing it the old Hard Way. Since I am a composer and an instrument-builder and instrument-inventor, nobody can intimidate me about this. I grieve when I find out how scared and crushed and intimidated the average composer or musician is. When I find out how much effort and valuable time someone has wasted on this problem. When I see so many attempts to prevent progress in composition, performance, or instruments.

It would have been a waste of MY and YOUR time if I didn't offer something better. Summer 1990 I had the opportunity to do a recording of twenty-two pieces one right after the other in two-two different scales, all at one session lasting three and a half hours. Brian McLaren edited the result and supplied a wide variety of timbres. See the ALL SYSTEMS GO announcement.

Just for the hell of it, I figured out that the proposed concert event would have to do in order to perform all those pieces on pianos. See accompanying ESTIMATE. It would take at least three pianists and 39 pianos! That would use up a thousand square feet of floor space in the hall and of course any rehearsal space. Grand pianos would cost about $400,000 and used uprights almost $50,000 and we're not talking Steinways or Boesendorfers. Months of practicing and horrible expense for tunings and hauling. As composer I would have had to spend almost a year writing scores in confusing new notation and the pianists would take as long learning to read them all.