OPENING THE DOOR TO THE NINETIES

by

Ivor Darreg (1990)

The Teens region, just beyond familiar 12--viz. 13 through 19 tones per octave--offers a great mood-contrast. These new moods multiply a composer's vocabulary beyond wildest expectations, since these new scales have different biasses. 13, for instance, is not what we could call a harmonious scale, but it has very unusual intervals that have not been worn out from overuse and a very different set of melodic tendencies from the other scales. 19, on the other hand, does have extensive harmonic resources, and therefore a different MOOD from 13. 17 has great melodic brilliance, so there is yet another mood and set of tendencies. It is rather like the various kinds of games, where we go from one game to another so that we can enjoy a refreshing change of rules.

Before the new instruments and their resources, this has largely been denied us. While a set, say of pianos, in the systems 13 through 19, is theoretically possible, who could house it? And who could afford it? And on earth would be willing to tune them all? To pose those questions is to answer them!

So long as the Piano was the Only Game In Town, and that has been the case for some two centuries, no one dared even dream.

If the idea of negotiating different kinds of keyboards scares you, take heart--I have been able to do just fine with ordinary keyboards and map the new scales onto them and go right ahead without tears or troubles, not even "batting an eyelash."? Those problems are pseudoproblems, red herrings conjured up by timid wimps.

Or, many people can learn to use computers and program them or use new software to have the computer cope with the problems of performance technique.

I no longer have to suffer the pangs of "wounded pride" because something I just composed sounds like what someone else did back in 18-umpty-ump. Why should you either?

*** ***

Let's move to another aspect of the new-scale possibilities now opened up with advances in electronics: as everybody knows, the old-style rotary dial is gradually being replaced by the new pushbutton phones. The familiar clickety-clack is giving way to these strange two-tone combinations sounded by the 12 new pushbuttons. Besides the ten numerals 0 through 9, there are new buttons with # and * on them, and indeed for some special equipment there are 16-button arrays, the extra buttons usually being labelled A B C D.

What scale are these buttons tuned to? Have you ever wondered? I thought about this a number of times, but it was only last year that I ran across a book giving the new pitches (frequencies) used for them. When I found out, I copied them off and sent the data to Dr. John H. Chalmers, Jr., then in Berkeley, California and being a music theorist quite interested n harmonic and scale structures, he obliged by doing some calculations. It turns out that the pushbuttons use one note from a set of 4 and another note from another set of 4. I.e., one lower note and one higher, and these pitches are very close to a 14-tone tempered scale with a stretched octave.

They are not in the orthodox 12 tone scale and there are some technical reasons for this, such as wishing to avoid false triggering of numbers by musical sounds and by certain vowels in normal speech.

But what concerns us here is--that millions of people every day are hearing the new scale and being "re-conditioned" by exposure to this scale they have never heard before, unless quite by accident. It must over the long haul, have some effect on the Public Ear and the attitude toward new tunings in general.

More remarkably, that this comes about through the decisions of a body so conservative as a phone company and its planners. The last place on earth you would expect a new quasi-musical phenomenon to come from.

During 1989, another subject came to the fore: ELASTIC TUNING. To explain this concept, I must flash back to 1962, when I was living in Los Angeles and decided to build an electronic organ out of surplus electronic parts in order to have certain features and capabilities that the mass-produced electronic organs of either the 1960s or today cannot have.

One of these capabilities was individual voicing. As you know, no two pipe-organs are ever quite alike. Each rank of pipes gets an individual going--over by an experienced voicer who regulates the volume and timbre of that series of pipes, usually to secure a gradual change in timbre as one goes up the scale. Even the old reed-organs of another day, and definitely the European harmoniums, got a considerable amount of individual voicing of their sets of reeds.

The high-volume manufacturers of this century simply cannot afford to do this in their quantity grinding out of electronic organs, and the hammond gear-wheel organ of the 1930s and up into the 50s was even more standardized and uniform in its tones than electronic organs proper. Since mass-produced instruments must have interchangeable standardized parts, there was little room for any uniqueness or individuality being one instrument out of big crowd of Peas in a Pod!

The mass-produced instrument has to be repairable by people who know nothing of music and don't acre anything about the history of the organ. And, more importantly for us at this moment, they don't acre anything about composers living today. Music has been locked into the past and progress almost stopped dead before the 19th century had run its course.

(Paradoxically enough, modern synthesizers and samplers do have some tweaking or re-voicing capabilities, so that the user can at least slightly alter the manufacturer's standard tonal recipes. But that's getting ahead of our story here.)

My 1962 organ was deliberately designed so that all its notes were absolute individuals, and there were slight differences in timbre between a given key and its neighbors on either side. This gave it life, and none of that tiresome deadening monotony in so many of the standardized instruments of the 1940s and 1950s.

Now, that wasn't all. In a standard electronic organ, the C's for example are totally and carefully isolated from the B's or the C#'s, so that there is no influence of one note on the tuning of another. (In some recent designs, there is only master oscillator and all the pitches are obtained by computer-like automatic calculations; but back in 1962, that was not the case ordinarily.) This total isolation of one note from another has almost been a fundamental principle of keyboard instrument engineering since things went electrical and electronic. However, this does not HAVE TO BE so. Individual voicing is perfectly possible with electronic circuits and now it would be possible with computer-music software. Programs could be written and some existing software can be individually customized.

Electronics has gotten a totally undeserved bad name because of the above-mentioned necessities of quantity manufacturing and its inevitable rigid constraints and economic limitations.

No manufacturer would tolerate a design like mine of 1962 because they simply couldn't afford to make it. Non-musical repair technicians could not afford the time to learn how to maintain such an instrument. So that's why this sort of thing has not been done hitherto. Let's go on: in the case of this particular organ, it actually saved some money and time NOT to isolate every note perfectly from every other!

The result of this "imperfect" isolation note from note, was to the effect the above-mentioned Elastic Tuning. When any tow notes were played simultaneously, or when a second note was played while the first was sounding, or when any chord was struck, the oscillators would advance or retard one another's vibration-cycles; and since these oscillators were not identical, this mutual action would be different for each and every instance of playing more than one note at a time.

While that nonuniform behavior is anathema to manufacturers and engineers and many electronic experts, it is what gives life and personality to many regular musical instruments and ensembles--the singers in a chorus have their own personalities and the players in a string quartet have theirs; and every time a pipe organ or a piano is tuned or repaired something individual is changed about it.

Unfortunately this organ was badly damaged in forced moves during the 1970s and destroyed in the 1985 move from Glendale to San Diego; so what is now left to hear are a few tape recordings. Recent better copies of these tapes clearly show the effect, however.

Very recently, Wendy Carlos, who is well known for synthesizer compositions and performances, wrote me with a very favorable comment on the Elastic Tuning monograph , and others during 1989 have added their good opinions of the monograph and the copy-cassettes. So it is more than likely that a replacement organ will be built by somebody, and then research and development will be done to take the Elastic Tuning idea onward from this point.

You need a little more explanation: let us suppose my organ was tuned to the standard 12-tone equal temperament that nearly all organs are tuned to. This indeed was the normal case while it was being used and before it got wrecked. Play a melody of one note at a time, and it would sound "normal," like many electronic organs. But now sound some interval or chord, 2 or more notes. It would in most cases try to un-temper itself, and move all or nearly all its tones toward what is called Just Intonation,a non-tempered scale where the tones do not beat. This process of the notes re-tuning one anther is not instantaneous: it takes an appreciable time such as .25 to 1 second. Generally we do not sustain chords that long is real musical performances so in most cases the moving pitches will not reach their theoretical just-intonation destination. This is not a problem! This is exactly what happens in unaccompanied choruses and in chamber ensembles!

I am told that it will be possible to simulate this effect to some degree on computers; that remains to be seen and heard. In the meantime, let's try to duplicate what I had been doing very well between 1962 and about 1974. Some persons have misunderstood my monograph and so it may have to be revised or, more likely, supplemented with a few pages.

It is only fair for me to mention the invention of one Mr. Waage who developed an electronic organ for playing conventional organ music having built-in computer logic circuits which "scan" the keyboard and see what keys and therefore what chords are being played at that instant, automatically retuning them to just intonation BEFORE they are allowed to be heard. This last point is extremely important! When the logic circuitry is switched in, the tempered intervals do not get heard at all. Before they could be sounded, the circuitry prevents it and jumps the pitches to just untempered values. There is not and cannot be any hearing of MOVEMENT form tempered to non-tempered chords. With Elastic Tuning, the MOVEMENT from tempered to just is continuously heard, whether it reaches its theoretical destination or not. Note that I just said "tempered," not "12-tone equally tempered" because this Elastic-Tuning principle worked with 17-tone or 19-tone or other equal or unequal temperaments just as well and quite as effectively as it did with regular ordinary 12.

No, we don't want the Elastic Tuning Principle in operation all the time on every keyboard instrument or musical computer. It has to be possible to reduce or increase it or turn it off at will. You can have too much of any good thing, and some performers are only too glad to show you!

In many cases, there will be a pleasing contrast and diversity when an Elastic Tuning instrument is sounding along with a conventional instrument not having this feature.

I don't really whether or how to celebrate a certain anniversary that comes up as of February 1990: it is exactly 50 years since I started tuning pianos and organs--and occasionally harpsichords. All those various developments in automatic tuning of keyboard instruments, usually built right in at the factory, gradually put tuners out of business. I'm not sorry, since it is much more fun to be a composer and designer of new instruments than a piano-tuner doing the Labor of Sisyphus with that huge rock rolling right downhill again and so there is no permanence whatever to it.

This is curious, to say the least: as piano tuning becomes scarcer, the user of the new synthesizers may not have any more to do with the tuning of that synthesizer than the pianist has to do with the tuning of a piano; but in most cases the synthesizer player can re-voice the synthesizer to some extent in a way that no pianist every could.

All these years and decades, the attitude of the piano maker and dealer and even teacher has been intimidating: musn't touch anything inside; you do not need to know; don't you dare ever ask any questions! What a shabby way to treat the owner, who after all is the one who pays all the bills, and without whom there never would have been any piano business.

Some years back on one of my trips I went to see a certain musical instrument expert who had a good many years of experience with pianos and organs. This was both a quest for information and a sort of courtesy call as I was accumulating knowledge and it went well enough for a while until I told him I was primarily a composer. Then his contempt for me knew no bounds! He said "composer?" as though it were the dirtiest expletive in the English language. End of a promising acquaintance that I had looked forward to for a couple of years and thought would be my ticket to success and/or opportunity to climb the ladder. What a crushing comedown! And all that reflected the 19th-century attitude of Specialization and "shoemaker stick to your last" that kept people apart and at odds who should have been working together. The very opposite of today's networking movement.

Subconsciously at first, I must have resolved then and there to start a network of people in the interest of causing progress in music including composers, performers, instrument-makers, and musically-inclined inventors. I am happy to say that all these years later there is indeed such a network in operation and we call it the Xenharmonic Music Alliance, and that I was one of several people who started it some 28 years ago.

***

This is a good point to define the term "xenharmonics:" by this word we mean some system of tuning instruments which does not sound like twelve-tone equal temperament in actual musical performances to average listeners. The common term "microtonal" does not suit systems whose unit or smallest intervals are not much smaller than the standard semitone of the ordinary 12-tone system. Calling the 13- or 14-tone temperament "microtonal" is absurd. Yes, it is true that some dictionaries do define "microtone" as anything smaller than the standard one-twelfth octave; but there are other dictionaries which place the beginning of "micro" at a quartertone, 1/24 octave, or nearly so.

Look in any good dictionary, not just in English but in other major languages: you will find that the word "tone" has far too many meanings. It has so many meaning, indeed, that in some contexts it can lead to hopeless confusion. One theorist some years ago seriously suggested introducing other ways of spelling the word such as "toan" and "ptone" and I forget what else, to keep the meanings apart in writing, but that would be too much to take.

I'll be charitable and not give his name--let this horrid notion receded into the past, shall we?

One fellow rote me that it was too late for me to do anything about it and I should give in to this mess--he even demanded that I agree with him to call the scales with only 7 or 8 pitches per octave "microtonal"--well I stopped writing to him and after all, there are more pleasant and sensible persons to deal with.

***

I hope you can see that the 7 and 8-tone systems sound so unlike our familiar scales that "xenharmonic" certainly can be a useful name including them.

One case where I do not want the term "xenharmonic" to apply is the many slight variations of keyboard tuning where for example a temperament with 12 pitches per octave is slightly unequal. Many systems of this type have been invented during the last three centuries or so, to make the keys close to C major on the ordinary keyboard instrument sound somewhat smoother at the expense of key near F# major which will sound rougher. I many cases these alterations of the inequality of tempering is so slight that listeners have to attend closely to notice any difference. I am a composer and I do not want everything I composer or improvise to sound like what somebody else has already done--maybe better! And as a matter of pride I want to enlarge the composer's vocabulary of melodies, harmonies and moods.

Indeed, this is what I HAVE DONE and have helped others to do, and this is not a plan for a nebulous distant future but something you can hear right now by listening to my compositions. At my age it would be plumb crazy and pointless to appeal to Posterity.

There are too many jillions of false hopes and plans never carried out and impossible dreams and empty speculative theories and compositions never realized in sound for me to add to their number!

During the last three years I have produced hours and hours of tapes of new music in new scales and with unusual timbres and on various instruments, some of which I built.

There are available NOW.

The new scales and instruments work; I don't have to argue or theorize about them: I can present the results.

The term "xenharmonics" includes both equal and unequal temperaments, and it also includes just intonation and some other systems, in those cases where to the average listener, the music does not sound the same as if it had been performed in the customary standard 12-tone equal temperament.

I cannot repeat a certain warning too often: 12 pitches taken out of a system having or needing more than twelve pitches per octave, are not enough! At the present time there are programs for computer music and schemes for retuning synthesizers and other instruments which do not give you all the pitches of the new scale, so you do not have the full resources of the beyond-twelve system, but only a lopsided portion of it. When such an incomplete system is compared with ordinary 12, the cards are stacked against it, and thus the newcomer to new scales is apt to get discouraged. Whole hog or none! In many cases, this providing of a crippled or incomplete system is not the provider's fault--i.e., they are not mean or malicious, but simply had no chance to obtain enough data about scales which require more than 12 pitches per octave.

Very few books on music that such designers of instruments or programmers of music software might be able to consult or obtain, present the possibilities of using scales having more than 12 pitches per octave adequately, because it is so recently that we have had adequate instruments and other resources in today's affordable and practical forms.

Maybe by the end of the 1990s the situation will be much happier. Last week I got a couple of letters from acquaintances and colleagues who were optimistic about the situation improving.

part of my motive in getting out this Report is that not enough people out there know how much the situation has improved already, getting rid of limitations and constraints which have stymied all of us in any effort we might have made to explore outside the old 12-tone scale. One of the biggest constraints was that any attempt to increase the number of pitches on a piano cost too much! Well, now we don't need to use pianos anymore. new keyboards are more flexible. Sometimes this is immediately apparent: sometimes it requires that the new commercial instruments be modified to make their hidden powers available to the performer.

I have the feeling that we are in a transitional phase: the problem of interfacing a performer with an instrument has not been completely solved. Especially now, with this new possibilities that never existed before, of playing a violin sound, either sampled from a regular violin or one that is synthesized or that is merely imitated to some extent from a keyboard, or from a guitar or even a sort of wind-instrument-shaped, breath-and-key-controlled body, this puts the player of the keyboard or other actual or simulated instrument body, suddenly in a position to play many instruments he or she may never have thought of being able to play before! A sudden unexpected surprise and what a challenge! An embarassment of riches dumped into one's lap without "let me explain" or "by your leave..." or "may I clue you in?"

This sudden incredible gift of so many unheard-of timbres all at once comes as a special shock to pianists, who many never have played in an orchestra and may never have seen the various performance techniques of the players of different instruments, and whose horizon and range of imagination may have been severely narrowed by listening to the one only timbre of pianos for years and years and years.

MORAL: Don't knock the synthesizer if it can't sound exactly like a piano and doesn't have all the restrictions you are used to because you never were allowed to get outside that corral.

When it comes to composers and they are suddenly turned loose on these new instruments with new resources, there may be a very uncomfortable feeling of "set adrift" and "sink or swim" for a while.

No wonder, then, that some people get very uneasy when I tell them or even show them, then and there, that not only are they to be confronted with myriad new timbres, but also with new scales they have never been allowed to hear before. The Enemies of Musical Progress are Legion. They would do anything if they could stop all these innovations. Well, they have kept you and me and the other fellow from hearing or playing these new effects for decades. Shame on them!

There's a lot of lost time to make up for, so get busy! I can't repeat too often, Don't get intimidated! Too many reactionaries out there are on a Power Trip and they want to exercise their power by stopping others and discouraging others.

Getting down to cases, here are some things done in 1989: XENHARMONIC BULLETIN NUMBER ELEVEN was issued, continuing some 20 years of these Bulletins. Number 11 contains information on the new electronic instruments, on Metal Tubes and Bars for building with ordinary tools and easily obtainable materials various instruments in new scales, and an educated guess about how the late Harry Partch, pioneer in Extended Just Intonation, came to choose his scheme of pitches. And continuing a long series running through many of the Bulletins, there is an article about he many-toned scales having 41, 43 and 46 tones per octave. Now these scales are not what beginners might start with, and they bring up questions of the strange notations and keyboards that some innovators have designed for them; but now that we have computers and software and synthesizers and various ways of composing in complicated scales without having to worry about who will perform them or how you can play in them or worrying about how to write them down or how you could learn new keyboard-designs, we can artfully evade all those problems.

Getting back tot he abovementioned Metal Tubes and bars, in my back yard here in San Diego are a number of such instruments, with various numbers of tones per octave: 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, and 24. The 15-tone tubulongs are the latest set, made in the summer out of standard electrical conduit pipe and at the top end of the instrument, out of heavy water-pipe for louder tone and greater sustaining power. One reason for making a new instrument in the 15-tone equal temperament is that 15 is 3 x 5 and thus the important equal pentatonic scale, found in many exotic cultures, is available at 3 different levels, and since 15 = 5 x 3 and 12 = 4 x 3, there is a connection between ordinary 12 and this 15 affair, such that three of the 15-tone system's pitches coincide with those of traditional ordinary 12, and therefore if one has a 12-tone metal tube or bar instrument, there will be 3 places where one can easily transfer back and forth from one system to the other. This property of 15 and 12 was exploited early this century by the Mexican innovator Augusto Novaro, who refretted guitars to 15-tone and used them in conjunction with orthodox 12-tone guitars. Theorists might like and actually have considered this as a subset of the 60-tone scale. In any event, some people might like to have pairs of scales which share some tones in common and because of that one can transfer back and forth between them.

Metal tubes and bars stay in tune for a long time--indeed, they could outlive me for a whole century. They are durable and hard to break or smash, so the kids can be turned loose on them to have fun instead of having to be an old mean grouch with "mustn't touch" and "hands off."

I have experimented with a variation of the metal-tube instrument called a Tubofork. One saws a double lengthwise slot in a piece of heavy steel pipe to create the prongs of a tuning-fork, and one leaves a sufficient length of the tubing below the prongs thus made to be the resonator. The result i s a loud clear tone.

***

The last pages of Xenharmonic Bulletin No. 11 contain a set of tables giving pitches (frequencies) for the 41-, 43-, and 46-tone equal temperaments and for harry Partch's special 43-tone extended just intonation scheme. Then there is a cents table comparing the 41-tone and 43-tone equal temperaments with Partch's scheme, all in cents, and also giving the differences for each degree of the 41- and 43-tone temperaments form Partch's cents value.

Music critics and commentators and various writers in books, magazines, and newspapers have very often confused Partch's UNequally-spaced just scale with the 43-tone equal temperament and created a serious misunderstanding that, something like t6he new "computer viruses" is self-propagating and gets worse and worse as each author and critic copies the misinformation from a predecessor.

Ervin Wilson established quite some time ago that Partch's scale is much closer to the forty-ONE-tone equal temperament than it is to the forty-THREE system which latter has a very different effect.

Thus is behooved me to comment on this situation when getting out Xenharmonic Bulletin Number Eleven. While on the subject of 41 tones per octave, I had some correspondence with the music theorist Helen Fowler of Brevard, North Carolina, so when she was in Southern California visiting her sister, they came to see me and I was presented with a copy of the 41-tone Pythagorean-system keyboard diagram she had invented. More recently I received a commentary from her on my new table of a Pythagorean series of fifths. This latter was based upon a temporary tuning of the 24 notes available on the two Farfisa electronic organs here, of which some recordings were made during 1989.

Out of courtesy to the memory of those two pioneers in the field of theory of tuning, Helmholtz and Ellis, we should allude to certain passages in "Sensation of Tone" and its translator's Appendix, where the near-coincidence of a note obtains by tuning eight perfectly perfect fifths downward (i.e., F-flat in relation to C, for instance) with a pure or just major third that has not been tempered, is discussed and exploited to produce several possible temperament systems that would not sound differently from 5-limit just intonation in any conceivable musical performance. yes, the minute tiny minuscule teenyweeny difference would be audible to keen-eared fussy attentive listeners in some quiet laboratory having precise electronic apparatus for sounding chords with long sustain and exasperating molasses-in-January slowness. But that will never happen in any tolerable musical performance in ordinary rooms or on recordings you ever would want to listen to. My promotion of new tunings and new instruments and new scales has at least some regard to commonsense principles of presenting music in the Real World to Real Live People.

I sure wish I didn't have to take up space over minutiae like the 614th part of a an octave, an interval on the very limit of average person being able to hear in a comparison of pitches or comparison of intervals. But if I don't discuss it here, I will be seriously misunderstood and all kinds of unfair arguments will be trotted out by the Enemies of Musical Progress to dissuade potential listeners from getting at all interested in my or my colleagues' new instruments and compositions.

That is, I must write about complicated musical scales such as 41 or 53 or 72 tones per octave, but that does not mean I will be using them very often.

Certainly I am not going to waste time writing such scales out in newly-invented notations and expecting, much less demanding, that any other musicians perform what I might write down in such tunings. The stars will all go out and Hell will freeze over and the Universe will collapse before that would ever happen.

Our assorted opponents will use arguments (which have some validity) against the adoption on conventional instruments of scales like 65 pitches per octave, against my or your experimenting with 19 tones per octave and this is cruelly unfair!

As a matter of fact, if you want to hear 53, 65, or 72 tones per octave so that you can judge for yourself whether they ever would be worth the trouble, we now have computers and sequencers and other equipment which can sound out such scales or actual music so tuned, so that no longer is there any need to worry about new keyboards or how one would do a live performance at normal tempo in those complicated systems.

Other persons as well as I have now established beyond the shadow of any doubt that it is practical to refret guitars to as high as 31 tones per octave and perform at normal speed on them. And that the result IS worth the trouble. There is a whole movement and group of composers, such as the Huygens-Fokker Foundation in the Netherlands promoting the 31-tone system.

If you aren't that brave, at least you can listen to 31-tone recordings, of which a good many now exist. In Xenharmonic Bulletin Number Nine several years ago I went into the matter of 31-tone equal temperament and the Meantone tuning and related tunings very thoroughly and published tables of frequencies and fretting tables also. This, along with all other back issues of Xenharmonic Bulletin, is still available, since it is a mere matter of going downtown and running off another xerox of that issue or any other.

Quite a far cry from what I had to do back in the 1950s with messy mimeograph machines, flammable inks, wax stencils itching to catch fire, and sticky black ink all over myself.

***

Back to those metal bars and tubes for a moment: in September 1989i, I was able to finish something I had waited quite a while to complete...I had made a set of 13-tone wedge-shaped aluminum bars, of some 2.5 octaves, and never had time to build it out to 3 octaves. That is, 40 bars for the 13-tone scale. And in that month the set finally had all the bars it needed.

In August 1989, Jonathan Glasier was at a place in the mountains of Arizona called the Rim Institute, and Ervin Wilson's set of 141 tubes, two octaves of an unequally-spaced 70-tone scale which he calls by the Greek-derived term the Hebdomekontany, was played in the open air and recorded by Jonathan Glasier on one of the new DAT machines--digital audio tape--and that recording captured the unusual outdoor atmosphere of that performance-spot.

Ervin Wilson is a draftsman, and has prepared many charts and diagrams dealing with the tonal relations and ratios involved in the scales he has constructed and researched. Some of his drawings and diagrams have been published in Dr. John H. Chalmers Jr.'s journal Xenharmonikon, which is not the Xenharmonic Bulletin that I have issued for some years, but the two journals deal with similar fields.

Seventy tones per octave is of course a large number, and different explorers of these large-number or small-interval systems have decidedly different objectives and attitudes toward scale-systems and express these variances in many ways--some of them choose just untempered intervals as Ervin Wilson did in this case; other choose this or that temperament--a notable instance being Julian Carrillo's set of specially-made pianos, which began with a whole-tone piano and by fractions of that whole-step, proceeded through third-, quarter, fifth-, sixth,...-tones all the way up the ladder to sixteenth-tones! That is to say, from sixths of an octave up to ninety-sixths of an octave.

I understand that some investigators have plans for an electronic instrument with 171 tones per octave and indeed the theorist John Chalmers has produced a tape which by means of a properly-programmed computer plays the 171- and 210-tone scales. With that many tones, peculiar illusions of hearing begin to happen. Somewhere beyond 41, the melodic value of a unit-interval deteriorates and then vanishes, while the harmonic value of very small intervals continues much further on. This depends on many factors which mathematical theories generally do not pay much attention to: timbre, tempo, kind of music in question, and the noise level and distractions at the place where the music is heard. Another very important factor, which I have discussed elsewhere, is the effect of recording a piece of music using small intervals and then copying the recording to permit distributing many copies. Generally several generations of recording and playback and copying and editing intervene between the performance and the copy-recordings heard by listeners, so there is much opportunity for flutter, wow, and unplanned-for shifts in pitch to occur in all these recordings and copying steps.

What this means in practice is that, beyond 31 tones/octave, unavoidable and unpredictable deviations of pitch will occur and degrade the fineness of distinctions that exacting and critical listeners to really microtonal systems would expect to be able to hear. All parties in the long chain of recording and reproduction must be told to allow for this.

In case you don't know it already, this is an imperfect universe. One should also remember that many computer and new-instrument tuning methods built into them at the factory do not allow for more than so much precision, so that below a certain interval-size, the actual sounded values will be larger or smaller than what mathematical theory calls for. Also, don't forget that the human ear is less sensitivie to changes in pitch at the ends of the audible range as compared with extreme sensitivity in the mid-treble. Few mathematical theories of music allow for that.

With some modern devices, it is quite possible to ask for and get more precision than anyone can hear. The result of that, of course, is wasted money and misdirected effort that could be valuable if used elsewhere.

There are a number of reasons for choosing one or another tuning-system: the most commonly discussed is that one will choose a non-12 tuning system to smooth the harmony, to reduce the beating of the tempered intervals when chords are sounded. Some proponents of new scales make that eh one and only reason for leaving the conventional 12-tone system. Harmony is everything and melody or expression means nothing to them. This is especially true among certain proponents of just intonation.

Actually, there are a number of reasons for leaving ordinary 12, as I said above. It might be harmony; but it can also be heightened expression by having leading-tones closer to their successors, as violinists are almost always taught to do; this might often go against smoothness of harmony. Maybe melody is the number one factor in a particular piece of music. Maybe a certain piece is atonal and harmony does not matter at all! Maybe counterpoint is the star in a certain piece.

Maybe you want to change the rules of the game. Maybe you want to change the bias of the system: by that I mean that 12-tone favors fourths, fifths, and major seconds, whereas meantone or 31-tone favors major thirds at the expense of the fourths and fifths as against fourths and fifths. This causes a given theme or passage to have a different tendency: a chord wants to resolve in a different direction than it would in 12 or some other tuning. Maybe you want a gentler effect, or on the contrary you want a more exciting, rousing effect. Either one to any degree you wish, you can get by choosing the proper tuning-system.

No, no point my going into fine details here. You have to HEAR the effects. To permit you to hear the effects. I have been very busy the last few years recording tape after tape on different instruments. No need to speculate or wonder or try to decide on the basis of arithmetic or on the precedents of Tradition. There isn't any tradition! That's the point! We seek an effect that hasn't been heard or tried before, not something hackneyed to death for a century of more.

Fortunately, some of the most novel and arresting effects are to be found in scales just beyond our familiar 12-tone, so these are quite accessible to you even at the beginning. Generally speaking, the moods or effects of the scales with large numbers of tones are more subtle--this is evident for example in the contrast between the forthright, more assertive mood of 19 as against the gentler, more restful mood of 31, although both are members of a Meantone Family which also includes 43 and 50.

The mood of Just Intonation will depend on how far it is carried out: to fifths and major thirds as basic intervals (what partch called "5-limit"; to harmonic or subminor sevenths (7-limit); to the strange eleven-based intervals as a few pioneers have done. Also, in the number of steps provided--how many fifths up and down from center, one or more steps of major thirds from center, and so on. To carry just intonation any appreciable distance will require many pitches, so the future will involve resort to computers and special mans such as sequencers and other means for making composition practical and easy enough, instead of demanding impossible fingering and instrument techniques.

The reason there has been so little progress toward new tunings has been that until the new electronic affairs reached practicality, the composer in any new system was making impossible demands upon performers--scrap their skills and training, rebuild their instruments, learn a new notation for each new system (with a few exceptions such as 19 and 17).

Much propaganda for non-12 systems has been for JUST ONE SYSTEM besides 12, and often this has been accompanied by arguments against any and all other systems. I am asking for equal rights for 20 or more new systems, including just intonation and the unequal temperaments and even frankly inharmonic tunings for atonal music and for special effects. With the new facilities, we can do this without extra expense. hitherto, the cost would have made it quite out of the question. Why have nearly all previous efforts been for just one new system? I already told you: ruinous expense, coupled with forcing regular performing musicians to go against years of training. This simply is no longer necessary--we do not have to disturb the musical Establishment at all, because new instruments already available, and computers, and new recording techniques such as the cassettes, make the composer the performer and thus nobody else has to learn the new scales. All we would of them is to listen to some of our new accomplishments.

We don't have to crusade anymore! The new music is its own persuader. Doesn't that make for more peace? We don't have to abolish existing musical structures to introduce our own, because we don't need the musical establishment and they can ignore us if they wish.

I couldn't crusade even if I wanted to, because it would cost too much. But I had to wait many years for the marvelous resources we have now, and for new people to give me access to them.

During 1989, I continued with a long-time investigation into timbre, which acquires a new importance once we leave the customary 12-tone tuning and the conventional instruments. Some experimenter has advocated this or that tuning, and you try it, and maybe you don't acre for it, or you're disappointed, or not sure. Why does he like this new scale, which doesn't seem to do all that much for me?

Quite possible, it's timbre. You may have spent some years at a piano, which has only one timbre with the tiniest variations. He may have an experimental instrument or a new synthesizer with all kinds of knobs and switches, or a sampler with an amazing variety of old and new sounds.

Or you may play some conventional instrument, such as a guitar, capable of being refretted to a new scale, but he was using some kind of sustained tone. Or the other way around: he plays a refretted guitar, but you have a synthesizer or computer arrangement to handle the new scale, and this has sustained tones.

Take an actual case that I can demonstrate right here where I live, or I can send tapes to somebody: I have a 3-octave 13-tone metal-bar instrument with a very bland mellow timbre, while on the keyboards here, a number of brilliant sustained tones can be set up and put into the 13-tone system. A number of people have been surprised when the same things are played on both, for the bright sustained organ tones in 13 can get pretty hairy!

Timbre has a tremendous influence upon harmony, but almost no books on harmony ever discuss the matter; and there is very little notation for indicating timbre. Well, so long as all composers were to do everything only on the piano, they had no means of studying timbre in their studios. It was supposed to be studied as Orchestration or maybe as Pipe-Organ Registration. Few composers have been affluent enough to have pipe-organs in their homes, and if they scored for orchestra, they never got a second chance to revise a work as to timbre after hearing the one and only performance or rehearsal or what is euphemistically tempered "reading:" of an orchestral score. If the instruments were wrongly chosen, by the time they heard their timbral mistakes, it was too late to do anything about it! And what composer ever got a second chance? Not in my experience.

In the dark ages before electronic keyboards, the same was true of organ compositions; by the time you talked an organist into playing your piece, if you could, it was again too late to specify revised registration. Even after the coming of electronic organs, the registration and the actual timbre choices available on electronic organs as opposed to 1990 synthesizers or samplers, was totally unpredictable, because after electronic organs took over, "organ" lost its former precise meaning and could be almost any animal with a keyboard on it.

Thus today's performers and composers have been suddenly catapulted out of the drab black-and-white piano world where they had been for two centuries into an incredibly-complex world of a hundred--nay, a thousand new timbres, but no guidance on what to do with them.

Problem enough with regular ordinary 12-tone; but with the new scales one must learn which timbres to use with what scales, and there has been almost no experimentation in this field.

There's more: each timbre in band or orchestra is generally associated with some kind of playing technique--in modern terms, some peculiar interface between performer and that instrument. Now this connection will be historical/accidental, not deliberate by design. No engineer or planner sat down and decided that bassoons must have key-mechanisms and be much softer than trombones, which were not going to have keys, but slides instead; no, it was just allowed to happen that way. Obvious to anybody, really--how could such a terrible imbalance as the low register of the flute being unable to compete with a trumpet or the bass of the harp being almost inaudible through a wind or brass chord, have come about by deliberate engineering or calculated design?

Now with electronic keyboards, you can select bassoon or trombone timbre at will and play either at a wide range of volume-levels, not the traditional gross imbalance of soft for the one and very loud for the other. On your new keyboard, you have just ONE technique to play any timbre, not two dozen very different techniques. The composer for traditional orchestra or band doesn't have this simple situation, but instead must learn painstakingly all the limitations and shortcomings of many different kinds of instruments, and then wait forever and ever, Amen, for a chance to hear how his notes would sound. Adding insult to injury, many orchestra parts are written in some other key than the music is actually sounding, a dreadful anachronism when much contemporary music is "atonal," i.e., in no key at all!
That violin waveforms come from bowed strings and saxophone waveforms come from single-reed mouthpieces mounted on metal bodies is no longer relevant to the new keyboards nor is any longer the fact.

During 1989 I had chances to see drum sounds coming from people waving sticks in empty air, violin sounds coming from keyboards, and piano chords coming from a "guitar" body which had DUMMY strings that contacted fret-contacts electrically. Indeed the above-mentioned sticks-in-empty-air deal could sound a piano chord.

Any and all of my assorted music teachers from 1924 onward would have torn their hair out at the thought!

I believe that one of the new advances will be novel performer-to-instrument interfaces. The Theremin of the 1920s shows that in some cases you don't even have to touch the instrument. I'm willing to bet that interrupting or reflecting light-beams will become very popular as a method of playing instruments. Already several types of dummy keyboards exist, where one does not have to press the keys, but merely touch them or move a stylus over a keyboard-pattern.

I have a rather yellowed newspaper clipping in my collection that forecast the composer being hooked up to a brainwave or muscle-tension-reading machine and "thinking" of the wanted sounds, which would then be heard by the audience. This is no longer pure dreamstuff, as considerable progress has been made on it. Various ways like that to have dancers control musical sounds are already in existence.

Some of these new interfaces, though, might embarrass the performer in front of a critical audience. Not just one wrong note, but a torrent of them: I've had the experience once in a while. The other side of that coin is the tremendously-increased facility of editing one's recordings, leading to almost-too-perfect performances when things are revised and remixed and touched-up and reworked.

A bit of advice sometimes given to writers and public speakers is quite in place here: don't answer any objections BEFORE THEY HAVE BEEN MADE! Or, why torture yourself to please you enemies? Your friends will understand; and y our enemies will simply take this as an invitation to further and more impossible demands. It's almost like blackmail.

For most of what you will do on the new instruments, you will not be using nor pretending to use the conventional interfaces used by players of horns, violins, oboes, harps, or xylophones, so feel completely free to take full advantage of your new timbres and ways of sounding them.

No longer need you fight the limitations and shortcomings and quirks of conventional instruments--however, you should now turn your attention tot he limitations of human hearing. You do not need to cater to conventional performers, indoctrinated in the past; but you do need to keep within the ability of your listeners to hear this or that difference or nuance of expression.

I have already alluded to the unavoidable noise-levels in listening-rooms and for that matter, inside automobiles or on the street when someone listens on a portable cassette-player. Hardly anywhere is truly quite these days, so please take that into account when you play and record and make copies! It compresses your dynamic range.

Chances are that when Debussy wrote his "ppp," studio was not next to the freeway, nor were there any jet aircraft flying overhead.

But your listeners may have to turn up the volume to override just such raucous noises! Bear that in mind. Also, at the other end of the dynamic spectrum, don't get things too loud for the living room or the headphones of your listeners.

Back in 1972, a rock drummer moved in upstairs and I had to put on earmuffs. Then it would get too loud even for that to help and I had to leave the apartment and go the end of the block. I had to move before my rent was up.

***

What does that mean? The natural desire to go beyond what has been done in music before, has led to exploring the limits. New powerful amplifiers made it possible literally to deafen audiences and damage hearing. The search for extreme softness led to getting lost in the noise-level, as was already hinted above. Way back earlier this century, some composers went in for more and more complex chords, till about the time I was born, 1917, tone-clusters having all 12 notes of the piano's scale were invented. This carried music to the point of noise. The Italian Futurists had already crossed that border from the other side, with their intonarumori, instruments which gave some kind of tone to noise.

The chromatic scale, i.e. the idea of a 7-tone diatonic scale spiced up with the remaining 5 notes of the black keys used as decoration and as leading-tones to improve melodies, broke down. Atonality, or the equality of 12 pitches per octave, was the logical next step. Then any idea of composers getting inspired was laughed out of court and the cold-blooded dry-as-dust automatic practice of 12-tone serialism took over. I could never get enthused over such a mechanical rule-driven thoughtless procedure as serialism within the 12-tone equal temperament.

Please don't blame the Computer Age! 12-tone serialism was firmly established long before computers went into production. Personally, I am inclined to blame Behaviorism, the Rat-ification of Psychology degrading us to the status of rats wandering through mazes.

Abolishing the idea of inspiration and creativity and then having the RULES of serialism, not US, write the music--is that progress? In the heyday of serialism, when as I said computers and electronic keyboards had not yet taken over, it was applied to OLD conventional instruments such as pianos and clarinets and horns. You were not told of the existence of new tuning-systems, but were expected to stay with 19th-century instruments. Most advocates of twelve-tone serialism, at least until very recently, have not done anything for musical instrument progress or to advocate any musical scales outside 12-tone equal temperament. This is all the stranger in view of the fact that in some cases non-twelve tunings are better than 12 because the composer does not have to avoid the cliches of 12-tone tonal harmony is order to avoid having his atonal music sounding like something already done in the tonality system. This continual need to be sure one has not slipped back into tonality creates a certain anxiety, and most if not all of that anxiety could be very easily avoided by doing your serial or free atonality in non-harmonic scales. Bonus: much more assurance that you piece is really new and does not duplicate something already published.

I am asking for progress in music and this includes new scales and new instruments, not merely a set of new rules such as those for serialism. The German word AUGENMUSIK, which we could translate as "music for your eyes only," must have been coined for some of these works written by people who did not seem to care how the score sounded, only how it LOOKED.

During 1989 I spent far more time on new sounds than I have writing about musical questions, and one reason for doing this Report is to let people know how much is now available that I have done in new scales and on new instruments.

In recent years, there have been a number of books on new techniques of playing old instruments, such as tricky fingerings for the flute that get two or three notes at a time, called "multiphonics," and likewise for clarinets and other traditional instruments, but some of this looks as though the admirers of those instruments were trying to sound like the new electronic instruments--envy? Jealousy? I wonder! Sure: I learned quite some years back that I could get clarinet and whistling sounds out of my cello, but electronic instruments will do that much better and more conveniently. So will computers.

That kind of "extremism" is not necessary anymore, because the electronic instruments are here now. The result is that the composer no longer has to be dependent on performers; it is now possible to do the corrections and finishing touches on equipment that fits inside the home studio, so there is no humiliating wait for rehearsals and the composer is elevated to the status already enjoyed by visual artists such as painters and sculptors, who can correct mistakes as they go.

Virtuosity is no longer a sine qua non; composers do not have to be intimidated by prima-donna performers anymore. This has been the main stumbling-block stopping composers from trying out new scales with more notes per octave.

What saxophonist would care to playa new sax that has 22 notes per octave, with some strange fingerings that might even be impossible and would certainly go against all his practice and training? Even if he were willing, how could he afford the staggering cost of a whole row of saxophones for each new scale? Questions like these have stopped composers exploring and experimenting. They could not demand innovations because performers wouldn't go against the training they had received in following the directions of dead composers.

We can leave the players of the conventional instruments alone. If they want to go on worshipping the dead composers and ignoring those still alive and composing today, all you or I have to do is ignore them back! Our hypothetical example above, which would saddle those musicians with impossible expense, can remain pure imagination,a nd we can compose and what is more important, get HEARD, without their even having to know about it.

By disconnecting from the piano and orchestral Establishment, we can resume progress with new scales which cannot be sounded on the old instruments, and since we no longer need the old instruments, we do not have to ask any favors of their users. We do not have to try to write new scales in old notation, since, even if we can't play this new music fluently ourselves, the computer and sequencer will do it for us.

i am amazed at how man people are still hung up on purely imaginary problems which do not exist anymore! "How do you write the 13-tone equal temperament?"-- Or 22-tone, either equal or the unequal 22 srutis of India? Or extended just intonation, which involves new 7- and 11-based intervals for which there is no provision in standard musical notation? The accumulation of ratios shown as fractions in the scores of the composers who follow Partch is exasperating. What has an arithmetic lesson to do with their compositions?

More to the point, how dare I or any more composer in this busy world of 1990, ask performers to review their 5th-grade arithmetic of common fractions? That's what computers are for! It's almost suicide for composers to try to teach performers all kinds of new symbols and meanings of the old symbols when composer and theorists cannot agree among themselves about how to make a sign for "3 quartertones flat" or "1/31 octave sharper" or even what to call those signs or pitches after they have invented the notation.

Well, don't any of you worry about me! I will never put anybody through a rehearsal, and I have not done so for decades. I will never ask any performer to read a strange symbol since I won't ask them to pay my new scales anyway; I do not have to, now that I have instruments that will play those scales and record what I have done and make some corrections of my mistakes and even copy recordings so you all can hear if you want to.

If I can compose and record, then there simply is no chance for these new problems to emerge.

You and I both save money as well as time. What's wrong about that? Why must every composition be done the old HARD way?

Result, hours and hours of new music on tape during 1988 and 1989 and copies are almost as easy as falling off a log. We don't have to whine and cry because big publishers in New York won't print thousands of copies of our new sheet music, nor need we fuss and protest because huge record-company combines won't grind out a thousand disks for us. Suppose that I know ahead of time that only one person besides me will want to hear my latest work. Well, knowing that , I run off ONE copy and save money and bothering the wrong listeners and all that anguish and petty squabblng.

Instead I xerox sheet music or copy cassettes, only when and as they can be sent out, and thus manage to live within my means.

The old 19th-century way,I might never know whether a given piece was worth the trouble. Even if somebody did buy or beg a copy, they might never play it. Those to whom I sent scores and parts 40 or 50 years ago usually never returned them, and that was before the days of Xerox, so many of them have been lost, unheard.

The 1990s, or at least the early 90s, will see rapid changes in recording methods and machines, so nothing is permanent--something new happening every few months in digital and novel methods of recording and sound-processing equipment. This creates a problem which has not been sufficiently addressed so far: many important compositions by contemporary composers are on older-format tapes and in older types of computer storage and player rolls and other types of sound recording, which within a few years will no longer be capable of getting played back or copies.

This applies equally to spare parts for novel electronic and even acoustic instruments, which it may not be possible to keep working unless something drastic is done about it soon!

Why, there are old wire recordings and sound-on-film recordings of which there are no other copies; and of jillions of acetate 78-rpm disk recordings that were never copied onto tape. It may be too late already for most of those. The reason for bringing up the old stuff here is that much of what is now "playbackable" or copyable with current equipment, will no longer be salvagable or recoverable by the turn of the Century. Preservation efforts must start NOW.

Some commercial interests are doing all they can to Plan Obsolescence and make music records perish all the quicker. They care absolutely nothing for serious new music nor its composers, and do not want to help inventors or builders of new instruments either. As I am writing this, there are persons who do not want any of my music in new scales to be heard and have told me so with other persons present, so you do not have to take my word for it. Nor am I the only victim.

It is too late for such persons the stop the Xenharmonic movement, because it has been growing all during this 20th Century, underground at first, but now that th means of performing and recording and copying recordings in non-twelve have become affordable, these recordings have been circulated to so many places that now it would be impossible to erase all my tapes and even more out of the question to erase the tapes of a hundred or more other persons producing them today.

The keyword here is "alternative:" our new ability to communicate with like-minded individuals very far away without the slightest need to alert the Status Quo so-called conservatives, and without hurting their business either.

Our right to produce new kinds of music and instruments is part of the basic freedom of speech and freedom of the press and freedom of assembling that make this country operate. There are other alternative movements that used to be hampered by lack of communications and prohibitive costs and restrictions, such as the Do-It-yourself movement, or the really free press made possible by Desktop Publishing and copying facilities everywhere.

This Report would have been impossible in 1940--no recording means but scratchy 78-rpm cardboard acetate disks that wore out after playing about five times; no affordable tuning-devices to put instruments into the new scales; no pocket calculators to do the figuring; no computers to construct tuning-tables or examine and compare possibilities; no really portable electronic instruments because they were too bulk and too heavy; no walk-about cassettes-players for other people to listen to your results.

This brings me to an unexpected event of the last month: someone learned accidentally of my 1940 1instrument , the Amplifying Clavichord, and some changes in it and various research and development I carried on during the 60s and 70s until prevented by several sudden forced moves, illnesses, and the destruction of the amplifying clavichord when in storage and I had no place to put it. All that was left was a few pamphlets and a few recordings of the instrument when in prime condition.

It appears now that some information about it will be rewritten and incorporated into a forthcoming encyclopedia of keyboard instruments. Now that I learned of this in time to put it in this Report, perhaps I can hope that others will carry on from where I was forced to leave off. In 1988, I was able to take some passages recorded on th Amplifying Clavichord and copy them onto a tape where I then butted them up against synthesizer simulations of the clavichord tone and then added effects impossible on the 1940-1970 instrument.

Now I can and will make more copies of the pamphlets and tapes and update them, so that interested parties can develop that and related concepts. I might as well take the space here to describe the instrument and why I designed it in 1938-39 and actually built it in 1940 and composed on it, and later developed related ideas, such as the Megalyra Family of instruments and the development of new timbres more suitable for such scales as the 22- and 31-tone systems. The timbre of the piano just is not suitable for those, nor for quartertones (24 notes per octave), and that is why all the efforts with quartertone pianos never set the world on fire.

The worst problem was, and is still now and in the future, that hardly anyone knows what a clavichord is! 2For at least a century, books on music dodo not describe how simple the keyboard action of the clavichord is. Misinformation was copied from book to book without any apparent checking to see if it was accurate or not. The result was a confusion of harpsichord with clavichord in the Public Mind that continues right to this day. Earlier in the 20th century the harpsichord resumed life and growth and through recordings a a fortunate backlash against the overly-Romantic reprocessing and re-editing of the harpsichord literature to make it pianistic, the harpsichord was vindicated; and now with the boom in guitars and then the amazing fact that synthesizers can do harpsichord tone far better than they can approximate piano tones, it has just about overtaken the piano in both old and new incarnations.

There is another reason for this that certainly belongs here: the harpsichord is digital, right in tune without our Digital Computer Age.

So when researching alternatives to the Piano, and how to progress beyond the Frozen Status the piano had kept us in for a century, I did not have to make any effort to join the Harpsichord Revival, since others were already engaged in that First amplifying the harpsichord, then they were pleasantly surprised by being able to simulate it electronically, as you can now do with most of the keyboards now on the market.

The conventional harpsichord is not as loud as a piano, but almost. The clavichord, on the other hand, is extremely soft. That is why the harpsichord overtook it and left it in obscurity for such a long time. Then the piano developed more and more loudness till it eclipsed the harpsichord in turn.

Now electronic amplification has evened the score. Trying to build an amplifying piano is a thankless task, since unpleasant action and damper-noises get amplified along with the tone. Inventors struggled with this during the 1930s until World War II sidetracked the efforts for good.

Why is the clavichord so soft? It would be drowned out by almost any solo instrument, and a mandolin or ukelele might be as loud or louder! You may have read the story about how Handel wasn't supposed to be learning music, and a clavichord was smuggled into his attic so he could practice without being heard by his parents--but they finally went up there one night and caught him in the act.

In harpsichord and piano, all the energy from hammer or plectrum excites the string on both sides of the striking- or plucking-place. By contrast, in the clavichord, half of the tangent's striking-force is wasted on the portion of the string totally smothered in muting-felt strips, so 50% of your elbow-grease or Finger-Power is thrown away at the outset. Conventional clavichord tangents are flimsy and have no clout. The strings are loose to avoid wrecking the delicate wooden frame.

The clavichord's tangent is at once hammer and bridge. Only part of the key-travel occurs before the tangent hits the string, so that reduces the tangent-blow still further. The remainder of the key-travel down tot he bottom serves to stretch the string to provide a most expressive vibrato (Bebung is what the Germans call it). I almost don't want to call the volume level of the clavichord a 'dynamic range,' since it ranges from totally inaudible whisper to mezzoforte at most.

Let's discuss dampers: the piano's dampers are familiar to most people, with their felt pieces that fall (in grands) or are pressed against the strings by a spring (in uprights); they can be held off the strings by a damper (loud) pedal. In the harpsichord, the dampers are right on the jacks that carry the plectra (quills). But the clavichord does not have that kind of damper--instead, strips of felt or other material are woven between the strings at one end. The tangents, which are at once hammers and bridges, strike the strings just beyond the portion of the strings muted by the felt strips. When keys are not played, all strings are muted by the felt; and if you tried to strum the clavichord strings you would get a frustrated muffled stifled noise.

When you hit a string with the tangent on the back of a key-lever, the tangent, acting as bridge, cuts off the string at that point: one side cannot sing its note because it is damped by the felt: the other side of the string is the proper length to sound the wanted note. The tangent, as hammer, has struck the string when it cut off the sounding part from the muted part. So long as it is held there, the tangent keeps one part sounding the intended note. If the key is pressed down harder, it stretches the string and sharpens (now we would say "bends" ) its pitch. Moving your finger up and down without letting the tangent fall, creates the vibrato mentioned above. Now, let the tangent fall by releasing the key, and the entire length of the string will be automatically damped by the muting-felt.

Consider: Hammer AND bridge in one single piece of metal; dampers are automatic and do not have to move at all. No action machinery like the piano's Rube Goldberg contraption; the simplicity of the clavichord's moving part, just the key, is what engineers call "elegant."

Yet that simple key can convey vibrato and "aftertouch"--i.e., make a light quiver or quirk in the tone of the clavichord AFTER THE NOTE HAS STARTED TO SOUND! The piano can't; the harpsichord can't even do the piano's gradations of loudness by hitting the key harder or more gently--well, special harpsichords that could, have been invented, but I have never seen any, just read about them once or twice.

The clavichord went out of use because it wasn't loud enough to compete with other instruments. It had Quality but lacked Quantity.

Two hundred years, during which the clavichord was entirely forgotten by the vast majority of musicians and writers about music. During much of that period any mention of it was apt to be riddled with errors and misinformation.

Its extreme softness is why there was no revival of the clavichord at the time that Baroque organs and viols and harpsichords and recorders (fipple-flutes) did get revived. The remedy? What could we do? Why, amplification, of course!

No, don't try what many have: don't stick a microphone inside the instrument. Don't put a contact mike on the soundingboard either. It will be quite unsatisfactory. For one thing, it will pick up noises. That smothered frustrated muffled sound from the muting-felt trying to stop the vibrations of the strings will be magnified and very unpleasant, for one thing. You may get tangent-scraping also.

The designer of the conventional clavichords faces uncomfortable dilemmas. Make the transmission of the vibrations from the strings to the bridge more efficient and then it may be slightly louder, but have no sustain--indeed it becomes like a banjo--dry as dust. Make it less efficient for more sustain, and it is almost inaudible. "Concert des mouches" is how some French musicians mocked it. Try to save space inside the instrument and the muted length of the strings is too short and it doesn't damp properly. And so on.

If so, increase the volume, the key travels farther before it hits the string, then the famous vibrato is sacrificed or indeed is entirely absent--as in the Hohner Clavinet, a very-much redesigned amplified keyboard without true tangents, that was on the market some 20 years ago.

By the time I started building the amplifying clavichord, spring 1940, the magnetic pickup for electric guitars are fairly well proven and no t too hard to make at home. This seemed to be the most practical and direct way to bring the whispering clavichord up to the piano's commanding volume-level. Now came the research and development. Many kinds of pickups were tried. One kind had the nasty habit of picking up local jazz and pop radio stations, for its coils of wire formed a very efficient loop antenna tuned to their wavelength! Theoretically, an audio amplifier should not respond to radio signals, but in the real world it will.

Later on, better pickups were devised, and this effected one feature the conventional clavichord is not capable of: by having three sets of pickups at different points along the strings, different timbres became available, much as on the harpsichord, where different plucking-points can be used. The piano cannot do that, because of the sheer bulk of the many action-parts, so that extra sets of hammers could not be jammed inside of a piano. The monotony of timbre has been one of the major handicaps of the piano all during its life--one of the reasons I had for researching non-pianos back then.

Experience on the cello with vibrato was justification enough for seeking finger-controlled vibrato on a keyboard instrument. The different between this individual vibrato and that of the organ or electronic organ that is switched on and off is that this i done only when needed, not running all the time; and its rate and width are variable every second, not fixed by the keyboard manufacturer. This clavichord vibrato is YOUR vibrato, not THEIRS.

It is only quite recently that synthesizers and samplers have come up with "aftertouch" and features that would be anywhere comparable to the clavichord.

Most R&D efforts of manufacturers have for obvious reasons been concentrated upon cloning the piano tone and certain piano effects, and hardly anybody knew the special merits and individual personality of the clavichord. It would not be too far from the truth to claim that the latest developments approaching the clavichord's properties were stumbled into by accident.

The pianist, generally, complains about clavichord touch,a dn will squawk something awful when learning that there is "loud" pedal on clavichords.

Explanations why that is so fall on deaf ears and usually the confrontation ends in misery. So the 50 years since spring of 1940 have not been too pleasant to go through, especially after 1972, when there wasn't any clavichord in the studio to point to. I have not said much about the amplifying clavichord since those dreadful forced moves that made it necessary to put it in storage and then lose it entirely, except to write a 1976 article and send it to a few people at that time--until very recently, when certain parties learned that I had built the instrument.

In the meantime, there is a viable alternative: take the tones of the Megalyra and the Drone Instrument of the Megalyra Group, and put them into one of the new improved samplers, and then the clavichord tones to a close approximation could be played from the sampler's keyboard, if it has aftertouch as well as velocity. That might do for the time being.

It should be remembered that the main object of reviving a project of this sort is the performance of music in a desirable timbre and with a specially valuable nuance of expression; this is not the mere reproduction of a historical keyboard instrument, the conventional clavichord, as it was in say 1700 or 1750 with all the imperfections and serious problems of the technology of that time and the extremely faint tone that would be drowned out in our modern noise-levels. Enough people are nostalgiating and antiquarianizing already, and I have no intention of spending the last part of my life duplicating them. Since we now have recording, it is not necessary either to consider quantity production of such an instrument--mass-production factories wouldn't do so anyhow. Then, given the excellence of some recording studios now in existence, maybe the sampler approach would do.

At my age I simply could not build the replacement-clavichord, so that will be totally out of the question--too many other things to do and maybe no time to do any of them in.

However, there do appear to be persons enough, sufficiently skilled and interested, to hand the project over to, if they can fund it.

No matter what happens, copy-recordings from the clavichord tapes made some years ago are already sent out elsewhere far and wide, so the sound and unique expression of that instrument has been preserved for a while at least.

One advantage of the sampling method mentioned above, is that is would not be necessary to build a clavichord for each scale to be used when going outside the 12-tone temperament. Changing scales on an electronic keyboard fitted for xenharmonics is usually possible in less than a minute. So for changing scales on a computer-controlled electronic device.

Our recent tapes where we rapidly compare scales with one another and give the listener an immediate comparison with no chance for the listener's memory to fade at all, surely prove the point.

Another topic that has come up lately is a composition called "MEGAPSALTERION" that I recorded about 1972 after stripped down the Amplifying Clavichord mentioned above and them making some changes, cleaning the frame, and putting on 158 new strings, but hearing a very novel effect from them--they reverberated even though there was no sounding board and I had no put the strips of muting-felt in, so the entire length of all strings was free to vibrate--and moreover, to respond sympathetically to any other strings on that huge frame of their own choosing.

I decided to interrupt the rebuilding of the clavichord and the making and fitting of the tangents on the key-levers and the re-installation of the keys until I could conduct some of the experiments Fate was allowing me. No muffling felt strips; no keyboard; and the new pickups hadn't even been wound. So I did not tune it as a clavichord yet since it was not a clavichord at all tat the moment: it was a Giant Psaltery--or a Hammer-dulcimer if you wanted to play it that way--or the world's biggest steel guitar, perhaps. (I sure croggled the Purists and the Snobs and the Musical Establishment Bigwigs when I defined the clavichord as a "steel guitar with a keyboard"--they got Real Mad. Now what was this intermediate, rebuilding stage of this 8-foot frame with 158 new strings on it? I needed some kind of international technical name that would be acceptable in different languages. Greek derivation is the usual method of concocting internal terms of this kind. So Giant Psaltery = Megapsalterion.

Next question: how should I tune the ting? Leave it random and haphazard as was the fashion in avant-garde circles at the time? No, that would not elicit much sympathetic vibration nor resonance. It had to be more orderly. Not the final pitches it must have as a clavichord either--the strings had to be lower in pitch because of all the extra length required for the felt strips and Automatic Damping Function. Time for a little thought. --How about a Harmonic Series? Put consecutive strings in unison to allow for their graduated lengths and decide on some starting-note.

The choice after sleeping on it was Subcontra F, 22 Herz, the F just before the lowest A on the standard piano, keyboard. Then the harmonics, 44, 66, 88, a few strings to each, all the way up to the 23rd harmonic of 506 hertz, since the strings for the topmost notes had quite a percentage of their length involved in the muting and beyond-the-bridges area (just as has to be done in pianos and harpsichords).

It stayed that way for a little while--a fortnight or so. How to play it? Remember, it wasn't amplified in that condition--it rested on a table and two microphones for stereo were placed at diagonally-opposite corners of the frame so it could be recorded.

Wait for quiet enough time of day, get out various kinds of plectra, try the fingers, then little wooden hammers and rubber mallets and so on. Then a long heavy steel rod about 16 inches and another rod even longer--lay the rod like a bar for a steel guitar across many strings to get a harmonic series, or part of a series which can be on any note you like, no need to stay with the low F.

Opportunity here and now to get critical: too many just-intonation fans who build some instrument that is capable of only ONE SINGLE HARMONIC SERIES and they proceed to bore everyone else to tears and do quite a bit of harm to the cause of Just Intonation. The builder of such an instrument has the patience to endure one set of notes and that only forever, but your potential listeners and newcomers do not! Provide several harmonic series by any of the various means before you turn them off.

Please don't lock yourself into a limited series of notes! This is happening all too often now, as newcomers learn of a new tuning, use just one such, at just one pitch, and then find themselves trapped.

The long sliding bar mentioned above is necessary if you are going to avoid this unpleasant outcome.

Before Before finishing off the experiment and putting in the muting-felt strips and resuming the making and fitting of tangents on the keys of the clavichord, I did another experiment: various kinds of strikers and beaters on the steel frame, then exciting the longest strings longitudinally, which meant a very high pitch from those long strings. They excited sympathetic vibrations in all the other strings that were related to them, reverberating back and forth. A most unusual effect, captured int eh tape recordings, fortunately.

Once it was verified that the tape did record these unique effects, the instrument was reverted to the clavichord scheme and construction proceeded. Alas! That dreadful forced move on short notice, and having to put the clavichord, half-rebuilt, in storage, then losing it.

--Not because anything was wrong with the Amplifying Clavichord idea or the music that can be played on one. Not becauue anything is wrong with the MEGAPSALTERION idea either. Simply a matter of having no floor space and not being able to get any again later.

Surely you will be wondering, though...why bring up this 1969-to-1973 affair in my 1990 report?

1) Because unbeknownst to me, there has been some circulation of ideas and information from my early id publications resulting just now in brand-new inquiries and interest in these instruments and the sounds they could make. 2) Because there were no good means of communication and networking among interested persons widely separated in distant cities, 20 years ago; but there ARE now. 3) Because after all the decades of research and development that I have put in, and my advanced age, it would be a shame to let it perish in silence, when so many other people could use it. 4) Because of the astounding recent developments in synthesis, sampling, amplification, and recording, which make it possible for many persons to enjoy these effects without having to do it the Old Hard Way. Alternatives now exist, but you have to know...Alternatives to WHAT? And why bother? And are these ideas worth the trouble of investigating? Some groups and institutions and researchers would have the means and the floor space and opportunities to build and use and amplifying clavichord such as described above, and will want the information. 5) The megapsalterion just described, would interest even more persons, because it would be much easier to build and cost less.

One way of using a Megapsalterion that comes to mind is: a recording studio could have it as a "prop" to attract customers. Either in the waiting-room to try things out before sessions, or in the studio proper to record many novel effects; or why not BOTH?

Before quitting the subject, the name Megapsalterion may have been misunderstood by some readers of my publications a while back: for this name could have been applied to an amplifying harpsichord or some improvement upon such. That would be a perfectly appropriate and correct use of the name, so no objections on my part, so long as it is clear here in THIS report what I meant. Anyway, some people seem to have supposed that it meant I had engaged in building amplifying harpsichords. No, I didn't have the time nor resources. I used the name Megapsalterion for two things: 1) the intermediate stage in rebuilding the amplifying clavichord when it was temporarily clavichord when it was temporarily Something Else very different and excitingly so; 2) the Compositions recorded on it while in that tuning and condition, therefore the tape recordings thus produced.

The results obtained back then with the Megapslaterion led me to design and construct the Megalyra Group of instruments.

A number of people have requested information on that group of instruments, or even a desire a build a Megalyra contrabass or one of the smaller instruments of that family. Bart Hopkin in his Experimental Musical Instruments journal published an article of mine some time ago, and I have a series of leaflets and information pamphlets on the subject, as well as tapes with their sounds.

At my age it would seem advisable to interest builders of instruments in eventually making members of this group on a small scale, as so much interest has lately been evident. The key question here is: how many of those who "would like to build a Megalyra" would actually see it through to a successful conclusion? Do they have the perseverance and facilities? I have to be sure. Nothing is more pitiful than an uncompleted abandoned instrument in a corner somewhere.

Maybe I have to get some Professional Naggers first, to harass and bedevil the would-be builders until something happens!

New leaflets on the Megalyra group of instruments are available. There is a "spec sheet" spelling out what a Megalyra Contrabass is. "New Opportunities for the Music Explorer" describes the Drone Instrument and Hobnailed Newel Post as well as the Kosmolyra and the Megalyra proper--explaining these extensions of the basic steel guitar idea for the newcomer.

Besides that, there are fretting tables so that one will know where to put the colored fretlines on these instruments.

The tape collection here already has recordings of other people playing these instruments, and so it definitely appears the Megalyra group has a future, and that different performers will develop different individual styles.

Some have asked what kind of music will be played on these instruments or what repertoire is available for them. Don't worry. The design of the Megalyra started out with a commitment to compatibility. While it is true that these instruments bear just-intonation fret-lines, they also bear lines, right next to those, for the ordinary 12-tone temperament, so that moving ahead to new scales does not mean incompatability with the old. Having two sets of fret-lines also means that the instrument is also a color-coded comparison chart.

I can well understand the worry and where it came from. The famous Partch instruments were deliberately non-standard and incompatible, being designed from the outset with his extended-just-intonation, scheme in mind, and a clean break with what had gone before. They were not designed for other composers, living or dead either one!

Conversely, I have seen quite a number of steel-guitar-type instruments that bear no fret-lines whatever, and most of them do not have any color-code, keeping to bare metal or dark-finished woods.

The Megalyra and the Drone Instrument can use existing sheet music for a wide variety of instruments in the bass and tenor ranges. If you play some solo instrument, chances are you already have pieces prepared and even exercises and instruction-books for some other instrument that could be used to practice on these new affairs. No fair bringing up the professional Spoilsport's objection that nothing has been composed fro instruments just born, or that since only a few these instruments exist, nobody is going to write for them--actually some Megalyra pieces and parts to play in ensembles have been written already.

Many people evade this problem with new instruments by improvising, and that is already being done on all the instruments of this group. It works; so don't knock it if you haven't tried it. When new scales are involved, improvisation becomes necessary, because extrapolation from the tired patterns of the existing scale or continuing to rely on only the old rules prevents progress.

I don't have to argue too much: hearing the sound of the new instruments is their own persuasive sales-pitch.

The kind of compatibility built into these instruments permits you to choose your pace. You are not being forced or hastened into a new scale just because its fret-lines are there. It's simply a gradual and painless way to become aware of what lies beyond the ordinary 12 tones per octave.

Having two rows of fret-lines is not limited to the pair: 12-tone and just intonation. It could involve the 19- or 22-tone system or--there is one of the three Drone Instruments which was provided with the Bagpipe Scale and the Bagpipe Drone Pitches on the other side of the board.

Customizing in that way is up to the Customer. This is quit eh opposite of the Piano's situation, where the piano reached a status in 1870 or such a matter where no further improvement was possible. The Megalyra group of instruments is now beginning life and growth and improvement after improvement will follow during the '90s and the '00s. What a refreshing difference! Being at the beginning of a long evolution instead of being about a century after the end of the piano's life-cycle.

During the last year and more the reaction to the Megalyra has been most encouraging. Last Hallowe'en, but noon instead of midnight, we went to an elementary school on a hill and played several instruments. Jonathan Glasier and I, and the Megalyra was one of them, while the whole school marched in diverse costumes through the Music Room and put on our show while they put on a real show of enthusiasm.

People just can't keep their hands off the Megalyra instruments. Let the critics object and the scoffers complain: the fact remains that most people have voted YES on the Megalyra family.

Other instruments of the Megalyra Group have been seen by the public from time to time. The Contrabass Megalyra, however, has attracted the most attention with its "Tuned Thunder."

Unlike other contrabass instruments, which have only one string at each pitch (consider for example the double-bass of the orchestra which has four strings tuned to E, A, D and G, or the electric bass of the Rock band which also has that stringing), the Megalyura contrabass has four or five strings to each note C, G, and C on its accompaniment side, and its solo side will be strung with 4 or 5 strings to the low C's and 2 strings to the G, and 3 or 4 strings to the upper C. These 4 pitch levels unite to create a compound-tone sensation as heard (this principle has been used for centuries in the pipe-organ's Pedal Division, with multiple ranks of pipes played by those pedals).

The Drone Instrument also has 4 strings for its low C and 8 strings for its Tenor C, permitting this shimmering effect in the higher registers. Its drones may have 2 strings, unison or octaves. One side of the Hobnailed Newel Post will generally have a four-note chord with several strings to each note. The exact stringing and tuning of these other instruments of the group is up to the user. That would not be the case, if these instruments had been sold out to some huge impersonal Factory feared up for mass production, let me hasten to assure you!

As the Eighties came to an end, we all got to hear more electronic keyboards, with more and more special effects, as well as electric guitars and other instruments sent through various kinds of "effect-boxes."

This hard fact of the Nineties, which is NOT going to go away, makes such ideas as providing these shimmering unisons of 3 to 8 strings tuned to the same pitch of the instruments of the Megalyra and other new groups of instruments by other inventors, all the more desireable to use and promote. The more diversity and versatility we can build in, the fewer external effect-boxes we have to use and the less manipulation by sound engineers and recording studios will be needed.

It is much easier for a performer on these instruments to pluck just one or two of the group of such strings to vary the sound from that of the whole six or eight, than to keep turning an effect-box on and off and on and off.

These instruments have been designed with the thought of giving the performer some options which in turn create the possibility of players having individual styles.

We might observe that progress in experimenting and exploring the resources that lie outside the conventional twelve-tone equal-temperament tuning has been held back for many years by the concern over notation--composers were expected to write everything down beforehand and check and recheck everything, then hand it over to performers to practice and rehearse over and over. The composer was expected to exercise infinite patience, waiting an entire lifetime if need be, before some performer deigned to look over the work and perhaps be willing to practice it. Thus the performers have exercised dictatorial, autocratic, authoritarian, and arbitrary veto powers over many composers' ideas and the weight of centuries has thwarted any progress.

Since nearly all performers have been programmed to perform only the music of the past, how could any musical progress happen under such conditions?

But take this from any performer's point of view: can you realistically expect a performer to learn and use all the different notations that would be required for those twenty-two scales?! Well, of course, not 22 notations since some would be used in common by more than one system, but still somewhere around 16 or 17 ways of writing music down. How could a composer keep all those schemes in mind without making plenty of mistakes?

***

This seeming problem has not been discussed in public very much. In all my life-span I don't recall anyone having presented more than one or two non-twelve systems' notation-problems in any one article. This has been almost entirely subconscious intimidation--a sort of buried threat rather than a veiled one. "How dare you expect any performer to learn all those new notations and play from them accurately?"

Who could afford to have enough instruments built to permit using that many different scales in the first place? Who would be able to tune them? And anyone competent to perform in those new scales would be too busy already with conventional music, so would never have time to take new ones up, no matter how long they might live!

On the morning of 21 February 1990, I did not know that I would be expected that day, in one 3.5 hour session, to improvise on a keyboard I had never seen before, in 22 different scales one right after the other. I never heard or read about anyone else having done so either. Everyone including me had long ago filed away such notions under the heading of Impossible Dreams.

The VFX contains devices which permit it to calculate its new scales right on the spot, and then tune itself to them, and select from a vast library of timbres the sounds to play them with. Even after recording the performance, the timbres and other important parameters can be changed at will.

Nothing like the Old Days when one made a disk recording where not even a click or omitted or single wrong note could ever be removed. Thank your lucky stars that you did not have to endure the merciless reproach and nagging of a disk playback with just one mistake magnifying itself to mountain proportions each time you replayed it!

These new editing facilities and the new means of storing a performance such as MIDI and various computer software permitting storage of control signals rather than analog recordings of actual sounds permit the users to change their minds more than once if need be, and save much time, worry, and effort in the process of getting compositions recorded.

Thus the problem now is merely that of convincing other persons that the foregoing is not an Impossible Dream anymore: it is RIGHT HERE. For you and you and you.

And for me. Thus for us.

The present capability of copying one's recordings introduces another much-needed factor: FEEDBACK which means exchanging recordings with other composers and getting fast answers and networking and thus not having to overlap others' efforts too much nor duplicate research and the experimental part of composing needlessly. While there have been "schools" of composers now and then in the past, they didn't have the new instant communications such as telephoning and now copyable cassettes and faxing. They had to wait and wait till it was too late or never get any feedback at all; or even to have to IMAGINE what a hypothetical audience MIGHT say IF they could ever hear a theme. The inevitable consequence was relentless intimidation, leading to a punishing perfectionism, and the indecency to answer objections before they were made. Or deferring to criticisms which in fact would never be made, since nobody ever got to hear the music that was to be evaluated!

There have been many groups of musicians interacting and indeed enjoying immediate feedback since they were members of the same string quartet or choir or orchestra or band, and thus benefitting from one another; but in the last century or more only performers participated in this kind of interchange; composers were fenced off from it. The result was little progress in new kinds of composition, and none in this xenharmonic venture of new scales and new moods.

Unconscious knuckling-under to never-consciously-appreciated intimidation such as we have mentioned above, has made composers give up without a whimper. Hence nothing seemed to be happening for so many years.

Now let me take you back for a moment to Glendale CA in about 1980: I had built several sets of metal bars and tubulongs in various scales such as 5, 10, 14, and 15 tones per octave, and the house was too small to hold them, so they were in the yard next to the bushes and the avocado tree.

(Most of them are in the back yard here now.) So the neighborhood kids would hear these tubes and bars getting played by me or by visitors and come over on their way home from school or some Saturday afternoon and try them out for themselves. This went on for some time--several years in fact. Well, none of them objected that the scales were "non-standard;" they just went ahead and banged on them anyway.

Surely this lively outdoor test that went on week after week 1980 to mid-1985 should be enough proof of the pudding to satisfy all reasonable requirements. Bluntly: new scales and new instruments were being jointly evaluated by the new generation that is going to hear and to play them!

If either the scales or the instruments had been no good, surely that would have been established in those several years' time.

Similar hands-on opportunities to try out new scales and instruments have taken place here in San Diego, by visitors of various ages coming to this house.

This is turn is beginning to spark a desire on the part of many persons to build their own instruments, or to get some kind of electronic instrument and try out new tuning-systems. Those who feel they cannot learn to play a regular instrument as well as they would like to, should also take heard: they can now go in for computers and sequencers and thus bypass and short-circuit all the problems connected with conventional music practicing and having to acquire finger-technique. Yes, the reactionaries will lament the devaluation of virtuosity, but so what? Why remain silent out of silly fear? Or because you can't be a concert pianist in the year 1887? Shouldn't our ambitions and standards and possibilities be much greater now that we are living in the Nineties?

As Jonathan Glasier has said, you don't have to exclude yourself from the musical world anymore just because you don't have some kind of conservatorial virtuoso technique on a conventional instrument. Moreover: the musical world needs new blood! To progress we have to get new people from various fields outside conventional music.

In fact, people are entering the experimental musical instrument field and also starting to arrange and compose, from a number of walks of life. One way, for instance, is to start building instrument in a home workshop. Then there is the new interest in recycling everything--for example, leftover pipe and tubing can be made into percussion instruments tuned to a variety of new scales. Metal bars can be tuned to a wide range of tones; and of course wooden bars can make xylophones and marimbas. It isn't necessary to spend a fortune on new materials to get started in that field.

The late Harry Partch built many such instruments for his special ensemble, and his book went through two editions and contains much helpful information about how to take percussion and various kinds of stringed instruments such as psalteries.

Half in jest, about 10 years ago I put together a leaflet entitled the THE PIANO REINCARNATION PROJECT. The idea was that through widespread neglect, thousands of old pianos have been going to rack and ruin, and some of them end in junkyards or tossed into the dump.

While many of these weather-beaten pianos must be junked as beyond all hope, many keyboards can be saved, and the tuning-pins can be used for new kinds of stringed instruments, and often there is much hardware left that can be recycled into furniture or other musical instruments. The wooden "machinery" of the action-parts is generally of little value, but not take out the screws? One of my pet spoofs is to keep a box in the coroner with some of those wooden affairs in it and ask people if they would like a Piece of the Action? As we move into smaller and smaller quarters, and as most everybody will be getting new portable electronic keyboards of some kind, the number of discarded abandoned defunct pianos is bound to increase.

Another different way of entering the musical field is for those involved with computers in one way or another to expand that interest into computer music. This can be done without having to learn to play an instrument in the usual sense, since a typewriter-type keyboard such as the one I am now writing on,c an be used to feed codes into a sequencer or a programmed computer and cause notes to be played later.

Other people have gotten into music through a side-door by way of electronic and audio engineering. From passive listeners they may have kindled an interest in making music rather than just sitting back to let it flow in. In the past that might not have been a likely route for new people into music, but now that we are more in the ear of generalism than the old era of specialization, this becomes more and more a promising source of much-needed new blood. Indeed, if I had not other good reason for this report I could do it for them.

Sometimes people get into music through woodworking. Not only acoustic guitar or violin-making, but zithers or psalteries or hammer-dulcimers or xylophones or marimbas. They may even graduate from making ordinary furniture to making musical instruments. That is, their sideline may well turn into their main occupation.

It should be obvious enough that the sound sculpture movement gained much of its momentum by the way that many visual artists who had not thought of a musical career, became intrigued by the noises some of their materials were making or maybe the instinct in many of us to explore and experiment impelled them to sound some article or material that just happened to be in their studio.

That next step from sound sculpture to musical instrument--in many cases, that's just a matter of semantics! Why quibble over such things? Or one might quote from a Soviet book on music and physics where it was revealed that strange thereminvox instrument was the result of Professor Theremin as a young man having been set the task of devising a proximity capacitative burglar alarm in a radio laboratory back in 1919.

While many people are worrying about burglars these days and getting alarms of one kind or another, it is kind of interesting to reflect that stereo outfits in homes and cars are among the most frequency stolen items these days. Some of today's alarm systems do use principles similar to what the young Theremin was set to developing way back then! So the association between burglar alarms and music not all that farfetched, even now. Which leads me to what happened a few months back--a burglar got in this house late one night and I surprised him by leaping out of bed and so the only thing he had time to steal was a wornout portable radio. He was after much bigger game of course, bu luckily I scared him and he fled into the night.

Before leaving the subject of Theremins, we might mention that one Arthur Scholtz of Yaphank NY wrote recently asking for information on theremins and we were able to oblige. It turned out that he is in touch with a group of theremin enthusiasts who exchange information. The importance of that at the present time is that with most of the new electronic instruments and recording methods going all-digital, the thereminvox should be revised for contrast--because it is about the most analog instrument you could possible have. Furthermore, it is one of the most personal and intimate instruments since the performer is actually one of the variable capacitors in its circuits!

At this point in time, we have to be careful about how the musical instrument situation evolves. We who compose new music must not let manufacturers call all the tunes!

For one thing, quite a number of new instruments put on the market were taken off the market as fast as they had been introduced, so that now they are collectors' items.

The Digital Explosion has created a disdain in some quarters for analog or hybrid instruments, and during the last two or more decades, important musical inventions have been ignored, and so even experts in this field have presumed that those instruments or inventions, or the ideas behind them, were failures.

In most such cases, they might have been unsuitable for continued mass production, or they might have appeared to have been superseded, whereas in fact they still would be of value to composers and musicians.

Right in this house is an example of what I mean: the keyboard drum. A pair of metal boxes filled with old-style telephone relays, it is connected by a long cable to small keyboard with 16 white keys for each hand. back in the 1940s I got hold of those parts which were part of somebody's long abandoned experiment (I can only guess what) and when I tested the affair out, there were few if any clues what it might have been.

Well, no matter: it made some sounds when tested that suggested a snare drum and some of the percussionist's bag of tricks, so why not? Let's see if this could be used a rhythm-maker. Encouraging: it did more than I expected! It could play polyrhythms like 3 notes against 4, or 3/4 against 6/8.

Now this is an electric keyboard drum, not an electronic drum-machine of the kind of the market today. No transistors or IC chips in it at all. Just electromechanical stuff and lots of wires. It doesn't automatically play canned rhythm for you, but lets you do your own rhythms.

Thus an important intermediate step between acoustic instruments and electronic keyboards has been overlooked. It has just as much right o exist and to be widely used as those drum-machines do, or as electric irons or toasters have the right to exist and be widely used. Just because it isn't electronic shouldn't be a strike against it.

The electric keyboard drum represents a logical development beyond what the Italian Futurists of the early 1900s were inventing: what they called Intonarumori, which term meant "intoning or giving a pitch to noises." The kind of noises they mainly were interested in, where sounds of machines: the early autos and motorcycles and electric motors and various mechanisms that were new then--of course, some 75 or 80 years later, we have too much traffic noise and find it very difficult to share their viewpoint!

Here is Southern California at the moment, the dreadful sounds of helicopters hovering overhead can be particularly distressing--you forget all that you were about. back then, the noise the Futurists were "appreciating" (!) were fewer and farther between, more of a novelty and excitement than they could be to us.

Electronic musicians of today will think of "noise" as meaning what they call "white noise:" random sound without detectable pitch, or the other common meaning today, "unwanted sound" or whatever kind.

The Intonarumori were borderline musical instruments because they had a pitch-element which could be raised or lowered somehow. In the pictures of the early Italian Futurists, such as Russolo and Marinetti, they are shown surrounded by things which look no too different from the hand-cranked phonographs of vintage 1910 or 1916--tall boxes of some dark material with the big crank sticking out and openings for what looks like the mouths of old-time phonograph-horns. You made the noise go up or down the scale, usually siren-fashion, by turning the crank faster or slower.

Without today's electronic devices and parts, they had to be content with mechanical contrivances of the kind that would be found in old typewriters or early sewing machines or bicycles.

The electric keyboard drum doesn't need cranks for its pitch-element, as it is derived both from natural resonances of some of the metal parts in it, and from the kind of current which is sent through it to make it work.

There is a very wide field open for new instruments of this kind, since percussions have become very popular in recent years, and the parts to construct such instruments are readily available. The only obstacle to their proliferation has been sheer ignorance of the fact that this intermediate kind of instrument can be made, it is practical and durable, and not too expensive either, since such affairs can be constructed at least partly of recycled materials.

It's a way to exercise your mechanical ingenuity, and indeed to preserve some sounds which are now leaving the scene as certain machines and apparatuses constantly are being replaced by newer more silent devices. Some musicians may wonder at that idea, but after all: the human speech-organs deal in exactly what those Futurists were talking about: the Intoning of Noises! Consonants carry most of the meaning of words and modify the manner in which vowels begin and end by coloring them with assorted noises--many letter of our alphabet stand for certain kinds of futuristic noises: S, K, P, SH, F, &c.

Paradoxical but true: natural facilities built right into us enable us to communicate via that Futurist ideal, the intoning of noises. Or look at this from the other side of the question: the noisillating of tones, or whatever you wish to call it. Pipe-organs have wind-noise and violins have bow-noise and record disks have needle-scratch and tapes have hiss and pianos have hammer-noise.

Around the very end of 1989, I suddenly got an idea for an experimental composition which turned out to be relevant to the above-mentioned intoning of noises: on cassette No. 274 I tried out some vocal samples on the Mirage Sampler after first setting it up for the 19-tone scale. One of these vocal samples had somebody singing the syllables TAH and DU. Another sample had simply the vowel AH. There are other samples so plenty of opportunity for more experiments.

I had already tried simply playing the samples as one would play an organ or other keyboard instrument, but suddenly--here's a big idea! Sustain a single melody line as usual, but add an accompaniment of a percussive nature. How? Well, play the accompanying notes staccato. The syllable being used at the moment was TAH. When speaking English, we ignore something that is going on: initial P, T and K sounds are followed by a decided puff of breath, quite unlike initial B, D or G in normal English pronunciation. Many other languages do not do this, so this is one way we come to say someone has a foreign accent, although we may not know why we say that.

A couple of trials playing this way sufficed to find the right amount of staccato, i.e., cutting the accompanying notes off short a tiny instant after the vowel began, to make a convincing percussive effect. It wasn't just the percussive or plosive effect of the consonant T, but the slightly hissing noise along with the puff of breath after the T and before the vowel had a chance to begin and set the pitch, that made it sound like some kind of percussion instrument rather than that very same singer who had been sampled for the Mirage Sampling Keyboard somewhere sometime.

He (or was it they?) would never have recognized these effects. Indeed, he would have had quite a time duplicating it, although I am sure he could have. Nevertheless, using this staccato against a strict legato melody courtesy of the same singer, provided ample contrast between solo and accompaniment, much more than I would have suspected was possible. Furthermore, the sampler's modus operandi is such that one sample is moved up and down in pitch to provide the different pitches on the adjacent keys. Let's say the note F had been sung. The sample will ordinarily be used for E and E-flat, and for F-sharp and G, maybe for a few more notes than those. The result on playing the keyboard is that a signing voice rather than a piano or harpsichord or cello, that the vowel sung, and the consonant if any, will CHANGE if the playback pitch be raised or lowered enough. This TAH sample did not monotously remain TAH, but came back as TAW or TOH if slowed down and as TAA or almost TAY if speeded up a bit. If lowered drastically it can turn into DOH with a kind of "covered" effect, and if really speeded up it is no longer a voice, but some kind of funny instrument normally never heard.

The quickly-cut-off staccato syllable where the vowel had no chance to develop was a genuine Intoned Noise the Futurists might have enjoyed in they could have heard it back in 1907 or 1912. I don't suppose I will ever have a chance to let this singer hear himselves!

Another lesson we can learn from this is that the transitional sounds we utter BETWEEN the sounds spelt out in the letters of the words we are speaking or singing, are just as loud as the sounds we are supposed to consider as the only sounds in the word or utterance. Ignoring these equally-loud transitional sounds is a sort of cultural conditioning affair, but the physical fact remains--they are there and we hear them but do not pay any attention!

Time to make another poin there--the new resource of sampling can be used beyond the obvious matter of mere copying already-made sounds. It is possible to re-voice, and it is possible, once the samples are independent of the instrument or external affair which produced them, to subject them to a different technique, and to a different interface with the new performer of the samples. Nor need that be the end of the story: in the recording, or even the recopying re-recording process, further changes can be made. That should help to remove the stigma of having "stolen" a sound or undertaken merely to clone or slavishly imitate an instrument.. Let the stupid people who don't know any better do the "me-too" copying act and inject enough of your own personality into what you do with th e samples and the instruments which are based on some kind of cloning.

There are so many ways now of modifying a sound to make it your own instead of the factory-supplied article that there is little excuse for that particular kind of laziness such as leaving a certain setting on all during a piece or using the same configuration forever and ever.

The most important part of a new effect is being able to shut it off and turn it on briefly here and there. I can still remember when so many people were using too much reverberation. In the old electronic organ days, it was boredom with monotonous vibrato.

Look at it this way: in a textbook on orchestration, the statement was made that the effect part of having a snare-drum in a piece is its entry. What a far cry from today's pop groups where the drums go all the time with no rest, and what they will do is absolutely predictable! The inevitable result was the invention of the Drum Machine and I don't have to the tell you the consequences of that!
Recording machines have volume indicators to warn you that you are getting too loud and it's going to distort if you don't hold back. Well, there ought to be some kind of warning that you should turn off the vibrato before it gets too boring.

It just so happens that the kind of thing just mentioned is what composers traditionally are not allowed to control; thus they are put at the mercy of performers with no recourse at all and if they try to protest are told to shut up and crawl back into the woodwork.

That's what happened to me 45 years ago, many times. Finally, there seems to be some hope...

The tape exchange among composers is really working in our Xenharmonic Music Alliance. Just the other day, a tape from Denny Genovese in Florida with a harmonic series basis, and one from Gary Morrison in Texas of a more traditional nature--this is what can be done today that was unthinkable when I was younger--I hardly ever got to hear what my colleagues and contemporaries were doing. I was expect3ed merely to IMAGINE what sounds they meant by reading the score! I don't think any of you would feel kindly if the waiter demanded that you eat the menu and merely imagine what their roasts and stews were like!

Yet that is how the world of new music has been for all time until very very recently. Take the time to realize how lucky you are now. It's not just that the composer can experiment on new instruments and keep reshaping and correcting, it is this new ability to hear and follow what others in composition are doing to get response when they hear my things.

Consultation. Comparing notes! Avoiding duplication of effect. Figuring out how to get their new ideas heard by more listeners. Taking advantage of modern methods of publicity, which simply have not existed or even been imagined hitherto. Not figuring out How to Succeed in 1910. How to Succeed in 1995 or 2001. Send the 19th century back where it came from!

***

Our greatest opportunity at this point in time is the simultaneous opening up of so many compositional directions: this means in turn that composers don't have to compete with one another for the limited opportunities as in the past. In just one room you can have a whole orchestra of timbres to combine or contrast as you will. That just was not possible before!

You don't have to envy other composers because the newly-opened directions are so many.

With present facilities you are not dependent on a performance to find out if the constructions of your imagination are going to work out, for you can heard them at once, and moreover, send copies elsewhere so that others can hear them.

Might as well list some things you could do right now:

[1] You can have a guitar refretted to a new scale. This retunes the guitar so you don't have to worry about how to tune the new system, and of course this removes all excuses and alibis and motives for procrastination! While fretting-tables are available from me, I am not the only source; and there are many guitar shop s who might be willing to do the actual removal of 12-tone frets and installation of new ones according to somebody's table of where to put them.

[2] Some synthesizers and samplers can be retuned to non-12-tone. In several cases, the software already exists to effect the retuning automatically. One form of that has indeed been provided to me for the Mirage, as computer disks storing the new tunings. It is available for certain other keyboards.

[3] If you are into computers, programs for new scales are available in a number of different forms.

[4] Certain instruments can be modified. The Korg PolySix synthesizer here is such. A few extra parts were wired in, permitting it to leave 12-tone.

[5] As related in my Xenharmonic Bulletin No. 11, you can make a set of metal bars or tubes, or wooden bars for that matter, in any scale whatever. This would have been a horrible tuning problem in the past, but the new tuning devices make it no more trouble than building such an instrument in orthodox twelve-tone equal temperament. You only have to tune it ONCE. It will stay.

[6] If you have the ability, you can re-program your own mind: what I mean by that is, if you play a violin or cello or unfretted instrument or if you have a trained voice, you can break away from your 12-tone indoctrination and play those instruments and/or sing in many other pitch-systems.

Of course, the average person will have been indoctrinated or programmed to the ordinary 12-tone scale and may not realize how intense this indoctrination has been, but there is hope now because recordings in various new scales and different kinds of remedial instruction-tapes will be available as more and more awareness grows of the vast new world outside the 18th and 19th century's resources.

[7] It is possible to get small charts of templates of paper or plastic or cardboard with new fret-lines to lay on top of the existing fret-lines of a steel (Hawaiian) guitar, and if you have access to the table sand data, of course you might be able to make your own. Obviously enough, that goes for a Pedal Steel also.

[8] Interchangeable fingerboards for acoustic or electric guitars have been available for some time. The guitar has to be specially made or re-fitted to take them.

[9] There is an electronic device called a Frequency Synthesizer, developed for various communication and scientific purposes. It would be possible to compose with the aid of a computer, this apparatus, and a recording system. Of course that will be quite expensive, beyond my means for sure; but some of you might have the access to the equipment and the desire to go that way.

The composer might call for pitches as frequencies in hertz and for durations, and the computer might have a range of timbres or the ability to synthesize them. This of course, would be free of the usual constraints of existing notations and conventional instruments.

[10] Let us turn our attention to rhythm: those content with what they hear in the background or on the pop scene may be content with a drum machine or the like, but that is only a tiny part of the rhythmic facilities you can you can have now.

Polyrhythms, changes in meter, many effects that conventional notation for rhythm makes awkward to write down, now can be recorded and it is possible to take certain new forms of recording and cause what was recorded to be played in a different rhythm without having to perform it again.

Be aware, though, that some of the existing devices and programs for computers, etc., are geared to unimaginative standard ordinary popular songwriting and cannot do the really new effects. You need better information about new software or hardware than the ads will provide.

[11] The unfortunate attempts to compress four-channel sound or "quad" into two channels on the commercial records and tapes for alleged re-expansion to Quad in the listener's room or the concert-hall or other playback-space, made for a widespread disillusionment with the 4-channel idea and its neglect since. So much for commercial green! We saw through the Fake!

However: some composers will have a real ball with Sound Spread Out In Space. Maybe more than 4 channels; maybe a sophisticated panning ability of the stereo image; maybe binaural affairs where the listeners must keep their headphones on for the effect. But if you can have a suitable space, you can set up multiple speakers and direct the sounds to come from here and there and up, down, across, and whatever, and move to and fro and even round and round the listeners.

[12] The borderland of musica and speech affords an area for exploration. Not just the obvious field of conventional song. The rhythm and phrasing of the speaking voice suggests that listeners may be more comfortable when certain aspects of speech are heeded by composer and in some way made to serve as subconscious underpinning for musical structures. Not too obvious but someplace in the back of the composer's mind. Certain conversational patterns in whatever language can be taken as agreeable methods of phrasing the music so that the listeners continue to breathe normally and not get restless or irritable.

Some people are experimenting with vocoders to make instruments "talk"--to transfer our speaking habits to what is being played on the instrument. The other direction is being tried also: experimental choirs who use new vocal effects which instrumental music has suggested to them.

[13] The many new ways to edit and change improvisations. This gives composers abilities which previously had been only accessible by other kinds of artists. Tape manipulation, editing, sound processing, recording instrument pulses such as MIDI code instead of the sounds, digital manipulations, &c.

[14] New forms to fit today's listening conditions. Compose for the headphones of a Walkman, or the stereo in somebody's car, or the apartment living-room, or the breakfast-nook, or the patio, or the table set up outdoors. Each place has its noise-level, limitations on attention-span, and so on. People get interrupted these days. Provide for that! Where they can leave off listening to you and resume later. This is not the Italian Opera House, nor is it the Podunk Philharmonic.