PALAEONTOLOGY DEPARTMENT: THE TWELVE-TONE PIANOSAURUS

January 1979

News, about 120 years after the fact. The front cover of Scientific American Magazine for January 1979 features a color illustration of the mid-section strings of a Steinway Gran Paino, in connection with an article by Prof. Gabriel Weinreich (Physics, Dept., University of Michigan). The article deals iwth coupled piano strings, that is, the fact that piasnos usually have 3 strings in unison to each note throughout most of the 71/4-octave compass (2 to a note in the bass for a compass depending on the size of the instrument; 2 to a note through most of the range in some older pianos); and there are some strange consequences of this situation.

The article metnions that as a result of these unison sets struck by the same hammer and very close together ont he bridge, the stirngs start vibrating in phase, faster than one would expect, at first; then the loudness actually recovers for an instant, before the normal "decay" sets in that would have been expected from struck strings. This "livens-up" the piano tones and might be part of the reason the piano has been esteemed for so long. Copious diagrams and explanations are provided.

It is indeed well and good that this hitherto-secret information is at least published--it should have been in Scientific American for EIGHTEEN-seventy-nine. That is: too much information about musical instruments has beenkept from the public and even from professional musicians--nobody is ever supposed to asky WHY certain things happen about such instruments--we are expected to be meekand never to experiment or raise any questions or ever bother manufacturers of instruments. It's almost like a Pianolatry Cult Religion. Pianists are supposed to be routineized programmed marionettes transmitting the works of dead composers only--dead at least 70 years and not more than 200--rattlingthings off autmoatically just as they have been told to do by a long chain of teachers, and never questioning the way sof the Musical Establishment. "Theirs not to reason why..."

A few years of pounding out tiresome Hanon finger-exercises for day after day is enough to kill nearly allthe creativity and inspiration and enthusiasm that any music student might have possessed, thoroughly mechanizing and automating him or her.

Today we have computers for this sort of programmed behavior: why dehumanize people any longer? It is doubly ironic: for the last 40-odd years, I have been acused and scolded for trying to dehumanize music by inventing electronic instruments and composing for them, when it is the Musical Establishment and the heavy hand of tradition that have been trying to make performers into mindless automata. Concert managers will only allow an ever-shortening list of standard works to be played--and all of these are available on too many recordings in version after version. The communication-channelf or composers a century ago ahs now beenchoked up tight and is useless for composers alive today.

COncert-goers who attend piano recitals or piano-concerto programs with symphony orchestras, do so to escape into an idealized Nostalgia Nineteenth-Century Dreamwolrd, forsaking the hustle-bustle of today's cities and freeways. I can excuse them for wanting to escape to the past, but it is very difficult for me to excuse Scientific American, a magazine featuring technological, scientific and engineering PROGRESS, for conentrating on 19th-century musical instruments and ignoring the innovations and new inventions and trends and the big business that electronic and amplified musical instruments have become. They have been featuring such articles on conventional mechanico-acoustic musical instruments for at least 20 years.