ANNUAL REPORT 1985

by Ivor Darreg

Jon Catler of New York City arrived with his friends one day in January 1985 and they finally located where Glendale was in relation to Los Angeles. He spoke of wanting to move from the East Coast to the West Coast -- no recent word on that in 1986, but it could happen. He has been active in using the 19- and then the 31-tone scale in actual live performances and recordings.

A year later, January 1986, here in San Diego, visitors and long-distance calls to start the new year off, so I for one am glad I waited. We'll get to that as the Report proceeds.

+++ Better break off for a moment here: my new address is: 4028 Boundary Street, San Diego California 92104, and the new phone is Area Code 619, 284-7075. This is somewhat northeast of downtown San Diego in a district (an older neighborhood) called North Park, and Boundary Street was once the City Boundary over 60 years ago. At the moment it is the shore of the deep canyon in which the 805 Freeway was laid.

Back to our story: 1985 began under a cloud of stress: there had been a big FOR SALE sign in the front of the front house for months and very strange people wandering back to my abode at odd hours. No place to go and no way to find it. Glendale is the capital of Naked Greed, trying to become the financial center of Southern California, and made itself a Cultural Desert in the process.

I had been interviewed for Keyboard Magazine a while before, and Bill Irwin's page appeared in the February 1985 issue with an account of my microtonal demo for him. This was an opportune break in a magazine devoted to pianos, organs, and synthesizers, for it should make the way easier for others who are going beyond the 12-tone temperament to which all the regular keyboard instruments are rigidly tied.

Redesigning the piano for non-12 is frankly impossibly expensive, and so long as the piano was the Only Qame In Town, that kept the lid on very tight against any progress in the xenharmonic direction. Electronics to the rescue! 1985 will go down in history as a period during which the trend toward portable electronic keyboards escalated and became evident to the public. Have you priced a piano recently? Your pocket nerves will ache!

Jeff Stayton, who has explored non-12 on a fretless electric bass, left his PAIA monophonic synthesizer with me when he had to go to the East Coast on business, and this instrument has proved useful for exploring and composing in the group of scales from 13 tones per octave upward. One merely has to turn a little knob in back to shift its tuning from ordinary 12 to 18, 14, 15, up to about 19. By overdubbing tapes 2 or even 4 parts can be superposed, permitting comparisons in three basic timbres. 13 and 16 will mainly be used for atonal counterpoint. Atonality should not have been re-christened "Twelve-Tone Serialism "-- its future lies with non-12 systems, for they will make the needed break from the cliches of stock 12-tone temperament harmonic structures. Please stop rummaging around in Schoenberg's and Stravinsky's respective wastebaskets! They knew what to throw away even if the academics who claimed to be their successors didn't.

Electronic keyboards are showing that tone-quality or timbre is a valuable factor. The piano is to the electronic keyboards as black-and-white TV is to color TV. Different tuning systems can be tweaked to their best by choosing this or that timbre. The piano timbre was originally thin and suited to small rooms. When it developed into a heavier and more powerful auditorium instrument, and when tuning routines evolved, the timbre was subconsciously altered in the direction of favoring the 12-tone system's intervals. This spoilt it for certain non-12 intervals such as quarter-tones. It dulled and blunted those intervals which involve the 7th and 11th harmonics. Thus a highly stable lock-in situation ensued. Timbre fit tuning as hand fit glove.

Walk past your neighborhood video arcade. You will hear all kinds of strange sounds and some of them are not in the 12-tone scale. If you are exposed to sounds from computer peripherals, you will hear other strange intervals, and the pushbutton phones are not in 12-tone either. These changes in our sound-environment are not very old. Some people will not admit they have occurred.

One purpose of this report is to let you in on these changes. Can you take advantage of them? Can I? Well, I almost lost out in February 1985 -- I was pulling my shopping cart north to the big market a mile from my then home and a car made a crazy-fool left turn behind me and snagged the shopping cart in such a way that it struck my right shoulder, and my left shoulder hit the hard pavement. It could have been much more serious. As it was, I lost the ability to reach upward with either arm for several months -- I couldn't play a guitar for four months nor my cello for eight months! I cannot sit down too long at a time without getting cramps in the legs so even now am standing up to use this typewriter. Almost a year later.

Computers are getting more accessible and more affordable. They now come in small and medium sizes and software for them is proliferating like rabbits. Rapid obsolescence is a problem with the incredible pace of computer development. For composers an important point is that mechanisms such as piano actions and organ machinery are now replaceable by mere programs (software) which can be written and even re-written as frequently as necessary. This means that some new instruments never have to be built; they can be simulated by writing a program. Instead of mechanically installing and removing new parts, one re-writes the instructions to the computer. Likewise for tuning and storing new scales. I actually saw a computer that could calculate scales and assign the notes to a standard keyboard.

Gary Morrison sent me a cassette with a program that sounded out the major triad in every temperament up to 53-tone! It compared these with the just intonation triad. Thus demonstrations are possible which would be too tedious to do live even if one had the skill.

In March 1985, I compiled a series of tables entitled DIFFERENCE TONES. These are the "third sounds" discovered by the violinist Tartini and sometimes named for him. When two notes are sounded together under certain conditions, a third one may be heard, whose pitch is the difference in frequency between the two tones. If the interval exceeds one octave, the difference-tone will lie between the two generators; otherwise it will be below both. I showed two-note pairs, then triads and tetrads in just intonation, and also showed the 12-tone tempered intervals and some common 12-tone-tempered chords. Over 150 examples in all. The just chords, even the real strange ones, produce a harmonious bass. The difference-tones of 12-tone, however, are not only out of tune, but are not even members of the 12-tone scale.

1985 was also the Centennial of the publication of Alexander John Ellis's English translation of Helmholtz 's Sensations of Tone and Ellis's own Appendix to it, which Appendix is really another book on Theory and Tuning and Temperament in its own right. Ellis is one of the most misunderstood and calumniated and slandered figures in all music theory! His enemies, some of whom are around now, and others back in his own time, have stopped at nothing -- their vicious polemics are absolutely unmatched for meanness. Vindication is certainly in order and I wrote a little monograph on him. How could it have happened in Great Britain, home of the tough Libel Laws?

In April 1985 John S. Glasier of San Diego died suddenly, and thus missed the performance of his latest work for string orchestra by weeks. I was brought down here for the Memorial Concert in May. Several of his friends have planned for future performances of his compositions. A 31-tone viola piece was performed in New York City. (JOHNNY REINHARD'S Microtonal Concerts.)

During May and June 1985 the pressure on me really escalated. The Glendale place was sold and they refused to fix the roof or the plumbing. There was no place to go. Los Angeles is jammed up tight with a vacancy rate of less than 1% and that is slightly worse than Glendale or Pasadena. I was ordered to get out 31 July. But the plumbing wouldn't wait. All the faucets leaked and the kitchen ones broke ON and no way to shut off the water! Flooding was imminent. So Jonathan Glasier took matters into his own hands and brought a truck up from San Diego and got me out bag and baggage a whole week ahead of time. Others such as David Hill and John McBryde and Wilbur George helped, and the next day Paul Burton of Long Beach went up to Glendale and rescued some left-behind stuff with John McBryde who had also returned to rescue things from the Destroyers. The McAuleys of Echo Park also saved some instruments and brought them down later on.

One reason of course for coming to San Diego was to become part of the Interval Foundation which publishes INTERVAL magazine for which I have written articles since its very beginning. We now are at Volume V, so this is no flash-in-the-pan phhffft venture. The Foundation has put on many concerts and informal lecture-demonstrations and some events which took place in other cities. At the moment of writing these words, Jonathan Glasier is presenting my Megalyra Contrabass and some of his own instruments in Tucson, Arizona. He built the Pentaphone, a 5-fold 5-tone percussion instrument, at and for the Exploratorium in San Francisco where it is part of the permanent hands-on exhibition.

* * * just intonation is not suitable for all music past present and future, but only for a large part of it.

An example I use now is my l94one composition realized as an overdub on various tape recordings, The Purple Bedroom Blues. Yes, it could be played in just intonation, but then I would have to rename it, for it would have lost all its spirit and spunk and zonk and impact, for most of these depend on the mood-effect of the imperfect intervals between some of the notes of the 19-tone equal temperament. In just intonation it would have become The White Lace-Curtain Blahs. I am afraid to publish it in staff-notation, lest somebody try to play it in ordinary 12 and mutilate the melody so much that it would seem incoherent and going nowhere.

(I evade and avoid notation by recording my stuff, so that I can stay out of arguments about how you write down 17, 19, 22, 24, or 31 or just.)

The actual working electronic keyboard oboe in a box with a keyboard on it (obtained from an accordion factory) was constructed here in San Diego in February 1938, 50 maybe that got homesick and insisted on returning to San Diego at this late date. It still works. How many vacuum4ube electronic gadgets can make that statement?

Now that you know about the origin of the electronic keyboard oboe, let's turn to the events of November/December 1985: Elizabeth Glasier had borrowed her father's synthesizer from up North and the Glasiers were about to move from a small home near the beach with a front porch ocean view to their larger home atop a big hill. If you have ever moved, you will understand how moving and settling eat up time, so she had a bright idea: why not lend it to me?

It was a fairly sophisticated synthesizer of the kind that any recording studio or rock group would enjoy having, Roland JX-3P. So for the two-month period before it had to go back North to its owner, I was able to take care of a nagging 30+ years of Unfinished Business: Compositions 30, 40, and even 50 years old, recorded as they should be for the first time ever. All during the last 20 years or so, the exasperating situation that if I had access to a good tape recorder, the only accessible piano would be a dreadful asthmatic thumpbox which should have been cut up into bookcases or coffee-tables and the keys made into dominoes; or when there was a Steinway Grand or other Name-Brand in good condition available to record on, then the tape-machine was such as to belong in the nearest trash-can. Fuzzy-wuzzy-muzzy full of clicks and pops and coffee-grinder noises and unpreictable speed-changes, so that Nasty mean critics were always griping and complaining about my tapes and running me down.

Two months with that synthesizer, dressing up my old compositions in brand-new timbres and using the resources of better tape-decks, has produced a pile of master-tapes and copies some of which have been sent out. The responses in my mail-box are a much-needed happy ending to the long years of unfounded rumors.

This brings up another matter, which many of you are already familiar with: To get any publicity in national magazines and newspapers, I had to be presented not as composer or musician but an Abstract Sculptor! The Megalyra Contrabass Steel, 6 to 8 feet long, and the Drone Instruments, almost that big, and the Hobnailed Newel Posts, are all painted in bright colors with a dual series of colored fretlines showing where the notes are -- both for the conventional 12-tone equal temperament and for some untempered just-intonation intervals. Thus these instruments are comparison-charts, not too different from the various scales on a slide-rule. They all have square endpieces so that they can be stood erect on either end when not being played. In that way they have been exhibited in several art galleries across the country. Stood erect, they become Mondrian and Kandinsky Totem-Poles.

I was frustrated at the last. "How in hell am I going to get some just-intonation and quarter-tone chords out of the JX-3P in order to exploit its timbres and do a comparison demonstration before they take the thing away?" -- and it was only two days before the deadline.

Necessity is the mother of: I borrowed a 4-track cassette recorder with variable-speed lever. I recorded a series of notes, moved the speed lever a bit, recorded another series over that, moved it again and recorded the third series on Track 3, and then moved it yet again for Track 4's. Result, nearly just intonation chord of ratio 4:5:6:7:9:11 and then 2:3:5:7:9:11. Simpler: Quartertone imitation of the foregoing, requiring only two speeds. Then other quartertone demos so I defeated the manufacturers and the design-engineers' lock-in to 12-tone! True, this was not a complete victory: I played all kinds of chords and a three-chord harmonic figure, but I couldn't have played any real piece; it would have sounded too jittery with all the unavoidable rhythm-mistakes and wrong notes.

So I hook up the volume pedal and get my cords to plug into the stereo amplifier and press the button marked Organ III. Wow! Best pipe-organ imitation I ever heard from an electronic keyboard -- of course it imitates only; one keyboard of an organ--no pedalboard and no second or third manual. But pretty nifty. It fooled many of my visitors who had heard real church pipe-organs recently -- they wondered if it were some kind of recording-deal. So what was "Organ II" like? Would that be another kind of pipe-organ tone? Ouch!!! it was such a perfect imitation of a 1938 radio soap-opera Hammond Organ that again, the visitors wondered how they could have put the gearwheel tone-generator inside that slim thin box. "Organ I" was also an imitation of another Hammond drawbar arrangement. I tell you they had it down pat.

From the sublime to the ridiculous by pressing the very next button. Of course I expected imitations; not that good; but to get faithful imitations of imitations so exact that you could compare the Hammond B-3 with a pipe-organ and hear the difference? Like wow, man. OK; let's try Piano II. I was going to need some piano tones for my 45-year-old compositions. Not too bad -- maybe an old square with two strings to a note and hadn't been tuned for a while. Now let's try Piano I -- why it's a Fender : Rhodes! Down to a gnat's eyebrow. The Harpsichord was only so-so.

* * * * The String Orchestra Button? Well, one of my visitors was frightened -- "You're going to put all us poor musicians out of work! How could you?" May I here be egotistical enough to think it was how I played it?

Some of the early compositions will be acceptable or even improved if they can be done in non-twelve scales, but most of them were satisfactory left as written. Even where I know they could be improved later, they had to be performed and recorded which I haven't been able to do or to get anybody else to do for all these years and it was a hectic race against time. Without hearing them nobody could be expected to help me get them played or recorded or heard -- was a vicious circle catch-22 of forty long agonizing years' duration.

During the Fall I had some I help from Paul Burton who had lent me a 4-track reel-to-reel a year before: he borrowed back some master tapes and remixed them and made some edited cassettes which will be copied and distributed. Then he returned the master tapes soon after.

Jim French collaborates with Interval and lives in Solana Beach some distance north of San Diego. We were invited up there and he got out Glen Prior's 19-tone Tubulong which had been brought to him, and laid it out in his front room so that the visitors could try it. He has invented a 19-tone wooden sax quite as loud as the metal ones. He makes unusual wind instruments.

Around Xmas 1985, John H. Chalmers, Jr., the music theorist who has been in Houston, Texas for several years, visited San Diego and updated us on a number of matters--he plans to move back here where he used to live, in the middle of 1986. He would then be active in Interval Foundation and also assisting in Jonathan Glasier's use of the new Amiga Computer for music-related purposes. Chalmers had produced many computer tables several years ago when programming and calculating was much more difficult than it is today, and from these I derived further tables and information on new tuning-systems which I embodied in various issues of the Xenharmonic Bulletin. Before returning to Houston, he accompanied us to the offices and laboratory of Ad Laser in North San Diego County where they have developed the Musoid, a combination of a synthesizer with a projection laser that can put Lissajous figures and oscilloscope-type tracings on a screen or wall, as well as displaying more complicated figures and traceries which can be programmed to suit the need of the occasion. Randy Johnson and Richard Roemer explained how this was done, and we explored the educational possibilities of seeing something changing on the screen while various musical intervals were being sounded. A pattern will stand still if the interval is in tune to an exact ratio; for tempered or out-of-tune intervals it will flicker and jitter. The thirds and sixths of the 12-tone system are shown to be quite edgy and restlessly beating while the fourths and fifths are only slightly "out" and lazily shift the pattern.

Doug Keislar, who is in Northern California connected with the electronic music studio and music department of Stanford University, had been corresponding with me some time ago. He arranged to come down to San Diego and meet me and go to Jonathan Glasier to see the Amiga computer and to hear our demonstrations of various non-12 scales and try out the refretted guitars. Up at Stanford they have done consulting with electronic keyboard makers and considerable experimenting with new sounds. My correspondence with him started when I was in a round robin correspondence published in the Musical Six-Six Newsletter of Thomas S. Reed in Kirksville, Missouri. That journal promotes keyboard redesign and notation-reform, and some of this round robin was about nomenclature. What shall we call that note now called F-sharp?

In its turn, this generated another hassle about naming notes: I cited the practice of many instrument-makers and now the xenharmonists, of numbering the tones of a tuning-system in such a way that orthodox 12 would have C be 0, C# be 1, *** through B as 11. In Mexico, Julian Carrillo did that for all his music, using numbers instead of note-heads and a one-line staff whose degrees were whole octaves, not just degrees of the diatonic scale. Presto! one-line staff music paper is already available as ordinary ruled writing paper. No problem.

31 December was when Erv Wilson and Jose Garcia came down from Los Angeles to see the Interval Amiga computer and offer advice on how to get some new non-twelvular music out of it. They didn't stay very long, so we have no New Year's Eve parties to report, alas. Sunday the 29th of December was quite another matter, however: I had been expecting Irvin Hunt from Pasadena who has a recording studio, to bring a friend of his along to discuss what instruments here might be worth recording (he had made some recordings a year ago) and imagine my surprise when instead of 2 people, 6 arrived with a load of equipment and it wasn't recording, but videotape. Indeed they were here all of 5 hours. This is a tiny cottage, and it is difficult to have 2 people in here at a time, let alone 6. My neighbors surely wondered what was up. I learned some something, for instance how to mike certain instruments, and about the new pressure-gradient microphone.

Gary Morrison came 11 January 86 and spent some time. He is one of the few persons who actually have been able to plans and carry out their plans. Everything he wanted to do when like clockwork. He outlined for me his plans for a non-twelve synthesizer and what he thought it would require in the way of features. I supplied him with a set of my musical themes composed years ago when I had to write them down and there weren't any xerox machines or tape recorders, and some of my latest publications. He has already composed and played in quite a number of tuning-systems such as 1O, 14 and 19.

Bart Hopkin has started a new journal in Northern California called Experimental Musical Instruments and I just submitted an article to him on the Megalyra Drone Instrument, and Hobnailed Newel Post -- the family of instruments I have built during the last decade to extend the century-old Hawaiian Steel Guitar Idea. I ended up, as already mentioned above, with Sound Sculptures; Mondrian and Kandinsky Totem-Poles, which have been recognized for their visual appearance and there still has to be some promotion for their SOUNDS. The Megalyra needs no sales-pitch when someone hears it -- it plays the Richter Scale! The Drone Instrument leans in sound toward the instruments of India that have long thin strings and a buzz.

The Hobnailed Newel Post is a four-sided beam of wood strung on all four sides and bearing the colored fret-line scheme like the other Megalyra family members -- viz.: 2 octaves of just-intonation lines and 2 octaves of 12-tone-equal-temperament lines, this on each side.

In effect, it is a performance instrument like a Pedal Steel but with no sewing-machine or bicycle mechanism on it; and it is also a Harmonic Laboratory for composers, arrangers, teachers, etc.

While I tune their strings to just intonation I will not excommunicate anybody for tuning them to their piano, and I am willing to play the Megalyra in a Bach ensemble or with any piano accompanist if one comes along.

If we don't make continual audible comparisons of the conventional 12-tone equally-tempered scale with the dozens of new xenharmonic scales, nobody will realize the worthwhile contrasts and differences or the endless new resources those other tunings make possible. Those Purists are a pain in the You-Know-What.

David Wiles of Midland, Michigan, had a sudden opportunity to visit the West Coast (he had corresponded with me a while back but his concert tour then didn't bring him into Los Angeles). So he made the side-trip to San Diego and later saw the San Francisco Bay Area before going back home to Michigan. He is a percussionist and so acquainted with a wide variety of instruments and has built various kinds. The balmy weather while he was here filled him with thoughts of moving some day.

A good reason for chronicling January 1986 here is that Jonathan Glasier decided to attend the NAMM Show (annual event for musical instrument industry and music publishers and other music-related commerce) in Anaheim, Orange County CA, right across the way from fabulous fairytale Dizzyland, as Interval Foundation is getting into Research & Development and that means more mvolvement with electronic instruments and computer music (as must be evident by now from this present bulletin). He met important people in the field and brought back a pile of magazines and brochures.