IVOR DARREG

TWELVE PITCHES ARE NO LONGER ENOUGH!

Because of the new musical instruments and new forms of recording now available, a brand-new set of opportunities for contemporary composers has opened up. This, by the way, is something I predicted a long time ago, and have been working and waiting for.

First was the electric guitar boom, propelling the acoustic and hybrid guitars of various kinds, including the electric bass, into prominence. Then came the cassette tape, making recording possible almost anywhere -- and playback truly portable. Later came effect-boxes to control timbrer and home studio versions of mixers and editing facilities and other means whereby a composer can model and shape the music and erase and make corrections immediately. No longer any need for the agonizing delays to get a performance. Notation becomes an auxiliary, rather than dominating and intimidating the composer at every turn. (The academic and avant-garde and serialist schools of composition had elevated notation to a position of power and contol so high that it no longer mattered how the music sounded, nor whether it was ever listened to-it became music for your eyes only -- seen and not heard.)

The cost of conventional instruments has been continually climbing, keeping pace with the altitude records of missiles and rockets in the space programs! How much would a composer have to pay to get performed by an orchestra these days? Don't ask! It's too painfully expensive to think about --indeed the cost of a conventional performance of the kind a 19th-century composer could obtain, may exceed the cost of today's new instruments.

Not too long ago the crossover occurred: the new electronic keyboards -- most of which are portable -- came down below the cost of pianos...yet these new keyboards. have several qualities of tone while the piano has only one. These new keyboards are rapidly changing and adding new features while the design and capabilities of the piano remain almost exactly what they were 110 years ago. Out there in the Real World, the average piano has been deteriorating, getting out of tune and out of whack, since few people can afford all the repair and maintenance as well as tuning, that the piano must have. However the Image of the Piano as it was in the Days of Its Glory is still alive and well, and classical recordings maintain that Image for many listeners.

Those who want to compose have been scared stiff by the weight of Centuries--the textbooks with their antiquated rules, the enormous body of classical compositions which originated in Central Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries--why, it's practically a religion with saints and pantheon and priests and of course the rituals of years of boring tiresome practice and drill which saps the creative faculties. If chemistry courses were as far behind as harmony courses, we would still be teaching and believing in the Phlogiston Theory.

Thirty years ago I lived within walking distance of the Music Department of a University and could observe at the many recitals and concerts how originality and creativity were being trained and drilled out of the composers and performers presented. One was reminded of those time-travel, stories in the science-fiction maqazines where the Time Machine breaks down leaving the protagonist trapped in 1870 with no way of getting back home to 1988.

Now the new electronic keyboards are made in the Piano Image. They could do so much more than the manufacturer or designer allows them to do. I said above, New Opportunities for Composers. Well, if we composers do not act soon enough, we could lose these opportunities. The average student or performer is not aware of the crisis confronting today's composers: Tens of thousands of composers and arrangers and musicians have exhausted the possibilities of the ordinary twelve-tone equal temperament to which keyboard and fretted instruments have been tuned for some two centuries. It's a matter of Pride: do you want merely to imitate the classics? Is there to be no progress because much of what you will do will already have been composed by somebody long gone?

It is already possible with the new keyboards to bend pitches, but the pitch-benders on most of them snap back to the ordinary position. Some instruments can be retuned. But generally, this means altering the pitch of each pitch-class--for instance moving all B-flats a trifle up or down from their 12-tone-equal place. It thus does not give you all the notes of the 19-tone temperament, for instance. Well, if you have only 12 of the 19 pitches that that system requires that scale is crippled. You cannot progress. All you can do is hear PART of it and Goodbye ambition! Put a just intonation or harmonic series tuning on it, which are available for some of these instruments, and you can't modulate. This crippling is even more severe. Nothing for a composer to do. The instrument so limited is apt to be put back to 12-tone and the other tunings -- a discarded nine days' wonder.

Do we then need new keyboards? Well not at first--that will be a possibility soon enough since some good designs for new scales have been in existence for quite some time. Even Generalized keyboards which fit more than one tuning-system. For the scales up to 24 notes per octave, such as 17, 19, and 22, and some versions of meantone and some just arrays on some instruments they can be mapped onto a conventional keyboard regardless of what 12-tone pitches are ordinarily sounded by the keys. Or two regular keyboards can be placed close together and the new scales placed on them. I have done both and so am quite sure they both work.

On guitars there is no such problem--re-fret to the new scale--this works all the way up to 31 notes per octave before it becomes too difficult to manage. I have refretted many guitars for myself and others and have published tables. [See Xenharmonic Bulletins 7 and 8 at this website.] The compositions produced on them prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that non-twelve-tone music works and is worth the trouble. Otherwise why would I be writing this? Why would other composers be exchanging tapes with me? Why would there be so many new people taking up the building of special Instruments?

It is not necessary to bother the Musical Establishment nor to disturb conservative musicians or listeners in any way, because we can now target interested parties and send them recordings. In a way this will be the musical form of Desktop Publishing. It is not necessary to have mass production of non-12-tone instruments. The recording does not care what system passes through it. The listener doesntt have to learn to read new notation. We don't have to go through the arduous lifelong process Harry Partch did, of having to teach all the performers a new scale that went contrary to their training. [Ivor Darreg, 1988]