NUANCES

Thawing Out the Cold Print

(1983?)

IVOR DARREG

The English language is seldom at a loss for words, but in this case many authors have had to borrow the French term nuance, which is usually defined as a delicate shading, a minute gradation, or what the college psychologists might call a just noticeable difference. At the moment, a French word is quite appropriate, for we wish to explore a notational habit of Claude Debussy.

Examine his celebrated piano pieces--say one of those written about 80 years ago. You will find a continual tracery and pointillistic array of expression-marks, to say nothing of the individualistic directions and phrases such as en sortant de la brune. Indeed, ignore the staves and clefs and notes for an instant and focus your attention upon the network of long graceful slurs (compliment the music-engraver, of course!) placed above short slurs and ties and lines and dashes and dots...and let's not ignore the way these are grouped and spaced on the page. If you will now try to recall the appearance of some recent avant-garde score or an abstract drawing at your friendly neighborhood art gallery, *** see where and whom they stole the idea from!

Why am I writing this right smack in the middle of the Computer Age? Well, 1984 is the 60th anniversary of my first piano lessons, and the 45th anniversary of my studying and practicing certain of Debussy's pieces. That's not the whole reason: so let's consider some technical matters for a moment.

Debussy would put a long slur over a short line which was over a dot; or he might put accent-marks over or under these other conventional signs, till in some cases a single note will have no less than 5 such marks simultaneously governing it! To this add the swelling and diminishing signs and the abovementioned individualistic metaphorical directions. He wasn't a frustrated visual artist turned composer, so those marks can't be there merely for ornament or idle decoration. If you've ever watched a calligrapher or engraver at work, you would not have insulted them by suggesting that they would add extra marks just for fun--in fact, I wonder how Debussy ever persuaded the publishers to get all those multiple markings in there!

Now consider the physical, mechanical side of it: the piano contains wooden machines, one for each key-lever, called the action; this mechanism throws a hammer at a group of strings and catches it before it can bounce. While one can apply a wide range of force to the key and obtain a wide range of loudnesses, the cold hard fact is that the hammer escapes in a tiny fraction of a second from the control of the pianist's finger, and flies to the strings and falls back and is caught--the rest of the duration of the note is out of control save for sympathetic vibrations occurring when the dampers are lifted with the loud pedal and the pianist choosing when to stop the sound by quitting the key or the damper pedal. The piano is NOT a clavichord in which the tangent is firmly fastened to the back of the key and so the piano does NOT have control of the string's sound for the entire duration of the note. The piano tones are NOT determined by the performer so much as by the manufacturer and his engineers, the action repair specialist, the tuner, and most important of all in these latter days, the deterioration of the instrument with age, accidents, and abuse.

Still more importantly, the average piano is no concert grand. It may we worn out. Probably is has not been tuned for a long time, and almost certainly in the 1980s it is not maintained--no repairs done on it. It may be a midget which represents actual retrogression from the zenith of piano quality reached late in the 19th century. Probably it will not have that wide range of loudness that the best pianos can give you. Often the dampers don't. There go some more of Debussy's expression-marks and directions! They never had a chance.

Oh-oh...this is not the end of the story either. Back in 1924 when I was first set in front of a piano and taken to hear talented pianists, this was live performance and an actual piano occupied many apartments as well as homes. Not so in 1984. 95% of the piano sound the average person hears today has gone through several of the following: microphones, equalized, amplifiers, preamplifiers, mixing-boards, radio transmitters and receivers, effect-boxes in the recording engineer's control room, reverberation devices, loudspeakers, crossover networks...why I could fill this page.

The pianist is now only one person in a long long chain of people and pieces of equipment for transmission, recording, control, modification, and reproduction spanning an unknown amount of time and space, and mostly consisting of items unknown to Debussy or any of his contemporaries when those piano pieces were composed, and therefore no way of anticipating what the average listener hear NOW.

With all that equipment standing between performer and listener, it is necessarily the case that the few live performances the average person hears will be subconsciously if not intentionally judged by broadcasts and recordings which now are the standard. In the average home or automobile or the new wearable casette-player situation, there cannot be wide range of loudnesses mentioned above at the beginning. The sound does not come from a steel string driving a soundboard, but from a small loudspeaker or headphone. Because of noises introduced all along the chain, the dynamic range had to be compressed! Some of the more expensive equipment attempts to restore this range by re-expansion, but the average listener is in a noisy environment and may do some extra compression. The composer is pretty much forgotten. In the case of Debussy, we have at least 70 years' distance; often 80 or 90 or more. And the music-teachers and critics and academics have the nerve to call that modern! To the impossibility of rendering the compound expression-marks and directions, the rest to be merely imagined by performer and by listeners. They demand that the above enumerated electronic channels be absolutely neutral and transparent, which is not only impossible, but insulting to all the persons in that chain, including the listeners. (Most hi-fi sets have tone-controls and other knobs and levers.) They demand this in the name of loyalty to the composer and to the piano, but it's too late for that. The average listener cannot afford a quiet luxurious home with a concert grand in perfect condition, so let's stop dreaming. The majority of concert-halls today cannot provide enough quiet to get Debussy's ppp undamaged to all the listeners' seats.

Today's world is noisier, and we must live with this fact. We can sometimes get the old-fashioned quiet environment, but only once in a while. So this means amplification to overcome the unavoidable noise-floor. The perfectionists and purists and traditionalists have no right to scold me or my colleagues and contemporaries as though we noised-up the environment! We are the victims of the noises, not their cause.

The purists cry "imitation" or "synthetic" when amplifiers are used, or electronic instruments displace the orthodox piano. Well, if 95% of what you and I and the other fellow hear today went through the abovementioned long long electronic chain, what difference can it possibly make? Even in the concert hall, we lose ppp. Would you rather see and not hear the pianist on the stage, becuase the ventilation blowers and traffic noises outside masks out the lower dynamic levels? Does that prove your loyalty to Debussy or Beethoven or Chopin? Staying home and waiting for night-time quiet and playing a record or tape of the piece will actually give you a more authentic whisper-softness. Or playing the piece on an electronic keyboard which can approach inaudibility without the wooden machinery of the orthodox action blocking and refusing to play ppp or making too much noise of its own!

So the dynamic markings along with the dots and slurs and dashes are disregarded these days when using the traditional instruments, but the electronic instrument can do it better. If it doesn't have this, it does have that and that which the piano cannot have. Yes, this is not authentic vis-a-vis the 1840 or 1910 environment, but it may be more authentic all told when set in our 1984 environment. When Debussy wrote a piece, it had to span only space to get to the listeners; now it must span TIME. You can't ignore that time-span. The difference between the then and the now environments is greater than the difference between the acoustic instrument and the electronic one. The all-electronic system is consistent with itself and is homogenous; the older instrument was never intended to be part of such a system.

I have been a composer for some 54 of my 67 years. So now it is time to take up the situation of today's composers. ALmost all of us have been trained in a 19th-century tradition. We are handed obsolete equipment, taught old-fashioned ways of using it, and forbidden by non-composers who have almost no imagination to use what is available today. We are commanded to keep within restraints and constraints which no longer are financially or physically relevant. Even the textbooks used by music teachers are censored, in fact if not in intent. They concentrate on mid-19th-century Central Europe, no the USA of the mid-1980s.

Small winder, then, that the instruments on the market today are mostly unthinking imitations of older instruments, with many of the old irritating constraints built in. The engineers, designers, manufacturers, and even inventors, almost never consult any composers, but slavishly follow the desires of performers who are not composers and many of whom perform only DEAD composers. Result: the 20th century has seen amazing progress in every field of art and science except music. The composer's status has been degraded to an intolerable degree.

Just compare the progress in music with that in any other field. Or compare today's textbooks in music and any other field. I realize this fully 50 years ago and did something about it. It was forced to design and built instruments. Then I had to wait decades. The communication system between composer and listener as of the 18th century worked fairly well during the 19th, but broke down in the 20th. You can't have feedback from today's listeners to dead composers. The performers therefore hog all the feedback.

The composer is treated like dirt. Just lately, new possibilties have come about. Now composers can fight back. If they wish, they can take the status of painters and sculptors: improvise, edit the recording of these improvisations, subject them to the recording studio's new powers of modification, then copy the master recording onto duplicates. This avoids both the musical notation and the non-composing performer. Another way is to use computers, specifying each tone with some kind of code, and edit this, cause it to become sound, record it, then duplicate the recordings.

Of course composers will not always prefer these modes of procedure, but it takes a big load off performers who have been trained only in old music, and then the composer no longer has to be a beggar imposing on performers who do not want to do anything outside what they have been trained in.

In my own case, I have recently gotten ample publicity for some of my instruments, solely as visual art-objects, as abstract sculptures, in magazines and art-galleries! Not for their sounds, but for their looks. It wouldn't have mattered to the visual communications media whether these instruments produced sounds or not. This was my only way to get known: the scores of compositions remained silent for decades in drawers and boxes.

Since we now have tape recording, it is no longer necessary to go through the agony of trying to publish sheet music and the unbearable delays and expense of trying to get it performed. That takes the pressure off the notation itself, since there is now less reason to use it and less reason to reform or improve it. It's no longer the only game in town. Composers do not have to incur the criticism and negative feedback from performers anymore. The listener will now know that the responsibility is all on the composer, and not have to wonder how much of this or that defect is the performer's fault.

Because of the above-mentioned delays I haven't much time left to live. I want to pass on my knowhow and experience before it dies with me. Surely this is not too much to ask. I seek involvement on a part-time basis with those who design and build new instruments, or those who are providing computer software for musical purposes. There was too much specialization in the last century--this is the time for generalists. I consider the total system from composer to listener.

For certain needs, thanks to the new recording aids already mentioned, it is now possible to design some instruments to be one-of-a-kind, specifically to be recorded, and thus escape the constraints imposed when one must design for mass production. For instance, this permits having special instruments for new scales and tuning-systems outside the 12-tone equal temperament, without disturbing the conventional musical world. The listener's hi-fi does not care what instrument or what tuning or what special features of the music are played through it. It is impartial. However, it is now part of the composer's instrument(s).

There is also a wide range of modifications possible in existing electronic instruments and music equipment and computer music programs. Customizing shops already are in business, so this idea is sound.