Unusual Instruments May Be Seen and Heard in Hilltop Studio

by

Ivor Darreg [From Expostition Boulevard Expose, 1973]

[Note: the Exposition Boulevard Expose was a mimeographed periodical which Ivor issued irregularly while he was living on Exposition Boulevard in Los Angeles. It dealt almost exclusively with non-musical issues: this article is the only one I've been able to find which concerns Ivor's musical activities. Ivor produced the Expose from about 1968 through 1975]

Regular readers of this journal may recall the item in a previous issue about the amplifying clavichord, which was severely damaged by the movers who brought it here from the condemned house on Exposition Boulevard four years ago, and then during the ensuing three weeks we were unable to get it into the garage for storage, so that the further damage from the weather and various persons intruding into the open back-yard became very serious.

Indeed, the instrument was left a rusty, torn, hopeless, mutilated wreck. It had to be stowed in the garage and forgotten--it was completely unplayable. While there were two responses to the news of the damage, nothing whatsoever was done about it--until nearly three years had passed, when Ervin Wilson arranged for the re-welding of the metal frame of the instrument and its transportation to and form the welding shop in North Hollywood, quite some distance from here.

The re-welding of the frame corrected two design errors made in 1940. Month by month, the work of rebuilding has proceeded satisfactorily, and soon the instrument will be playable form its 7-octave conventional keyboard once more.

However, there has been a most unexpected and remarkable 'bonus dividend' from the rebuilding operation: the instrument is usable even before it is rebuilt! Picture, if you can, a steel frame eight feet long and four feet wide in front--i.e. almost as big as a concert grand piano. Until just a fortnight ago, there was no keyboard attached to it--only a wooden sub-frame and structural members. However, all 158 of the new strings were installed, and tuned to an overtone-series ( not the ordinary musical scale, although it contains most of the notes in that scale) and these strings are mostly quite thin, like mandolin or guitar strings: none of them are wound--this is the reason for the 8-foot length--to avoid the inconvenience and expense of experimenting with five or six sets of specially wound-to-order bass strings, which would have to be discarded and their successors discarded.

Unlike piano or harpsichord, a clavichord has automatic dampers--not a damper mechanism, but three or four long, heavy strips of felt woven between the strings at one end, to stop the tones quickly immediately the keys are released. The hammers that strike a clavichord's strings are of metal, and are bridges as well as hammers: if you have access to an electric Hawaiian steel guitar, hit the strings with the "steel" and listen to the effect.

The clavichord went out of use before the harpsichord did, because of its extreme softness, and so the harpsichord revival movement of this century has not done much to rekindle interest in the clavichord. Rather, the new life and growth of the harpsichord has only added to the widespread confusion of just what a clavichord is.

It has been an uphill struggle, the last 30 years from 1940 to 1970, for this writer to explain why a clavichord is desireable, and beyond that, why an electrically amplified clavichord designed without a sounding board and with steel strings and steel tangents throughout rather than the brass tangents and partial use of brass strings that was customary in the clavichords of Bach's time and before.

What's a tangent? Latin word meaning 'touching,' applied to the metal bar sticking upward from each clavichord key, which touches the string and stays against the string for the duration of the tone.

As we said above, the tangent is at once hammer and bridge: where it strikes the string determines the pitch of the note, exactly as where the 'steel' is placed along the strings of a Hawaiian guitar determines the pitch of its tones. This means that on the compact designs of conventional clavichords one could economize on strings by having two keys or even three keys hitting the same string or pair of strings in different places, since one was not likely to sound B and C together in the bass octaves, and a tone-cluster like G, G#, A and A# was highly improbable, to say the least!

Since the tangent is at once hammer and bridge, and since the other end of the string is heavily damped with felt, the tone stops instantly on releasing the key, as compared with the after-sounds of piano and harpsichord. This makes for clarity. If the key is depressed harder than is necessary to sound the tone, the string is stretched tighter, sharpening the pitch. This means an individual, expressive vibrato is possible. This is the raison de'etre of the clavichord, what it can do that the piano and harpsichord can never do, and the organ's automatic tremolo imitates only poorly.

The educated, historically-devoted musicians and listeners think of the clavichord, if they know what a clavichord is, as a museum-piece for the authentic performances of early compositions.

The idea of amplifying it, or using it to play new music, gives such backward-looking people an unpleasant shock, so they sneer and pooh-pooh it.

Such has been the situation until a few months ago--only the last six months out of the thirty years the Darreg amplifying clavichord has been in existence, has the situation changed. But now it is quite another story.

The idea of amplifying it, or using it to play new music, gives such backward-looking people an unpleasant shock, so they sneer and pooh-pooh it.

Such has been the situation until a few months ago--only during the last six months out of the thirty years the Darreg amplifying clavichord has been in existence, has the situation changed. But now it is quite another story.

The electric guitar has conquered the world. You have but to turn on your radio, and no longer does the piano monopolize the scene. Also, the temporarily eclipsed Hawaiian steel electric guitar is coming back into favor. Guitars by the millions are entering homes and apartments, in many versions, electric and acoustic, with different kinds of strings and widely different tone-qualities. To make up for the lack of the piano's 'loud' pedal, synthetic reverberation is found on many guitar amplifiers; some kind of tremolo, usually reminiscent of the first electronic organs, is also often fitted. Then there is the fuzzbox.

As recently as five years ago, who ccould have predicted that the general public ear (not only that of the specialist, aficionado, or dilettante) would be so re-conditioned?

Now it so happens that the timbre of the amplifying clavichord belongs to the same 'family' as the various guitars and certain other fretted instruments, so here is a splendid unexpected opportunity, and we mean to take full advantage of it.

A full seven-octave keyboard can do much more than the six strings of the guitar, so that should be justification enough for the existence of this instrument. However, it should be pointed out that there is a great opportunity for composers and arrangers to produce works for several guitars, and preferably including electric basses to extend the lower range and mandolins or similar instruments to extend the upper compass. This is not a case of either-or; it is an expanded opportunity for both-and.

On the last page we alluded to the capabilities of the amplifying clavichord even before it was rebuilt. WIthout the keyboard and without the muting-felts, we have to all intents and purposes a 158-string psaltery, zither, and sitar, with the bass strings 7 feet long! Since there is no soundingboard, the tone lasts and lasts. The strings can be plucked or struck with wooden hammers as in the dulcimer, so they were tuned to an overtone-series to permit a wide range of sympathetic vibrations.

Furthermore, the metal frame itself may be struck with drumsticks or various kinds of wooden, plastic or metal mallets to elicit a wide range of percussive rhythmic effects, accompanied by a long-sustained reverberative echo. Pending the re-installation of the electromagnetic pickups, these effects have been tape-recorded in stereo--since unfortunately all these unusual sounds will be unavailable after re-installing the muting-felt strips for conventional keyboard playing of the instrument. Quite a number of visitors have come to try these effects for themselves.

The infatuation of some people with Oriental and exotic instruments, especially those from India, has also made for a greater appreciation and understanding of clavichord and psaltery tones.

It behooves us, then, to contemplate building some kind of large psaltery as well as other instruments, so that these effects can be permanently available.

To further this aim, copies of the tape recordings have been loaned out, and more copied will be sent as funds and time will permit. From the enthusiastic reactions of many listeners so far, it is practically certain that co-operation can be secured to build such instruments, whether here at this studio or merely under our occasional supervision and consultation. Why special one-of-a-kind or two-of-a-kind instruments? Listen for yourself; no long-winded argument is necessary. It simply is not practical nor financially feasible to incorporate certain unusual features into mass-produced instruments. But through tape and disc records and the new cassettes and cartridges, everyone can hear them. [ Ivor is referring here to 8-track tape cartridges, a format that now extinct. The reference to 'new cassettes' concerns NOT the Philips Digital Compact Cassette of 1992, but the original analog cassette tape format introduced in 1968.] Also, if a few instruments are built, they can be rented out, or time on them at recording studios can be rented.

The design of instruments for mass production, and the modification and improvement of existing instruments, and-or the fitting of accessories and attachments to them, is another matter. It will be our concern as electronic music consultant to assist on such problems, leaving the other factors in the given situation to the engineers and other manufacturing experts. We have the missing pieces to many electronic and conventional acoustic instrument puzzles.

As for conventional clavichords, which have a four- to five-octave keyboard and are usually small and compact, with a weak tone barely audible outside a medium-sized room, there is a future for them, now that the "classical" nylon-stringed guitar has developed an interest in baroque and renaissance music for the home, and now that so many people live in s mall apartments, mobile homes, trailers, campers, etc., or are not allowed to disturb neighbors when practicing at night, or are constantly 'on the go' and thus need something that can be tucked into a car and taken anywhere. Whether there will be much demand or a portable amplifying clavichord, a scaled-down version of our large instrument, remains to be seen; but from such discussion as we have had lately with knowledgeable persons, it looms as a definite and attractive possibility.

The crassest and crudest of financial considerations will determine whether the extra refinements of an amplifying clavichord with real strings and the intimate expressive touch of the performer's fingers directly communicated to those strings, will be practical in an instrument for quantity manufacture, or whether it will be economically more expedient to simulate and imitate these characteristics in a portable compact electronic organ equipped with percussion effects; such organs are the very next thing on the market after the growing success of the so-called 'combo' organs now seen and heard all over.

The present writer has already begun to compose new pieces and to arrange his older compositions for these portable electronic transistorized 'combo' organs, since they appear to be logical successor to the piano as home and school instrument (the concert grand will continue its lofty status in the concert halls and auditoriums dedicated to 19th-century dead composers).

He hopes to be involved in the further development and research on, and expanded use of, these new instruments, whose economy and convenience and portability will endear them to the "now" generation.

More about combo organs, and electronic organs generally, will appear in later issues, but this much here to make it clear that we are quite impartial, un-obligated, and uncommitted as between the quantity manufacture of such organs with imitations/simulations of clavichords, pianos, and harpsichords, and the production of amplifying clavichords close to or far from our 1938 design. We are not ignoring the existence of such instruments as the "clavinet" either, but it is quite impossible to give a written description of the many differences between these instruments and the amplifying clavichord--a face-to-face conference would be required, as well as an examination of models demonstrating the tone-production principles.

There are enough different styles of music and kinds of people who play them, and enough different nations and cultures and subcultures in the world, that there would be room for many kinds and subtle varieties of instruments.

In our studio, we have the loan of several instruments of highly unusual nature, such as the Grayson-Wilson 48-string psaltery with sound chambers and adjustable bridges; and two guitars re-fretted to the 17- and 31-tone systems respectively, this besides our own guitars which have been rebuilt to the 19-, 34- and 22-tone systems.

Also there is the Schafer Undevigintivox, built some 20 years ago, consisting of 77 steel bars tuned to 4 octaves of the 19-tone system; we plan to remount it and expand it to 5 octaves. There is a 5-string amplifying cello as well as a regular cello, an electric keyboard snare-drum, an electronic keyboard oboe recently overhauled, and a specially-designed electronic organ quite unlike any other.

"Surplus" electronic apparatus has recently been acquired and donated, from which will be made extensions to the organ and necessary repair and test equipment. The object of this studio is not rehearsal for concert-hall recitals and all that stuffy stuff, but rather tape recordings for tape machines in listeners' homes, living room to living room without the 19th century's fuss and ceremony and ritual and formality. That other world will be left strictly alone for its to enjoy undisturbed by me.