June 1985 Alert!

IVOR DARREG (1985)

The musician and the scientist (or the technologist, or engineer) do not use the same definitions for what appear to be the same words. Also, different kinds of musicians (keyboard, wind, string, percussion) have their often conflicting subdialects. The individual instrument-builder has still another terminology, and then the manufacturers and dealers have jargon far far removed from that of the musician. All the above works to the frustration and disadvantage of the composer, who is practically never accorded any respect, much less rights, by any of the above-mentioned kinds of persons or firms.

Result: a lack of progress in music while certain other sister arts prosper and enjoy amazing growth and diversity. For instance, sculpture. In my own personal case--plenty of publicity for my Megalyra contrabass stringed instruments as abstract sculptures, but practically none as composer or performer on those instruments.

The evolution of music is thus under the control of the wrong parties. The performer is elevated above the composer. The dead composer is esteemed while the living composer is shut out of all decision processes. Eg., the new instruments called synthesizers are usually designed by non-composers for performers who do not compose, and the musical patterns and tuning-system and machine-to-human interfaces are dictated by what performers of dead people's music want, not by any composer alive today.

Constraints are built into the instruments or into computer programs for musical purposes, such that composers cannot escape the 12-tone equal temperament, and beyond that, mechanical and other constraints of conventional instruments, such as the piano,a re built into the electronic instruments to prevent progress beyond what a piano or some other conventional instrument can do.

The only way I can escape this sad impasse is to compose at home on instruments some of which I build, and some of which I modify, and to record and overdub them and copy the tapes. It is useless to write for performers under such circumstances. I have been thwarted for 50 years.

Recently a new book was lent me, and some of my friends and acquaintances have this book or have read it: The Science of Musical Sound by John R. Pierce, part of a Scientific American book series, published by W. H. Freeman & Co., New York, 1984. There are two little disk records in back of the book with sound demonstrations, some of which are quite interesting.

It is illustrated throughout and there are many good diagrams and drawings relating to acoustics and to conventional instruments. So far so good--no problem. But there are also some errors of fact and slanting of attitude, much of which could be the fault of the publishers rather than of Dr. Pierce himself.

Let's start out with page 68: there is a phrase which one reviewer of this book calls "oxymoronic" (Henry Rosenthal in the new journal 1/1, issue #2) but I will be bolder and frankly call it self-contradictory. "Just Temperament." Don't blame Pierce for inventing it--I rad it a number of years ago in a book by Llewellyn S. Lloyd on musical acoustics and Pierce was quoting it without malice aforethought from a fairly well-known book. Blame Lloyd: just temperament belongs over in never-Never Land among Round Squares, Dehydrated Water and Egg-Unscrambling Machines.

The usual meaning of "temperament" is a system which strives to reduce the number of tones required in an octave (on a keyboard or fretted instrument for example) by systematically distorting some or all of the musical intervals, or using a certain pitch to stand for another. Just Intonation is a system of undistorted musical intervals, none of which are tempered. In a book which purports to be scientific, and written by a scientist of long-established reputation, this self-contradiction is very odd.

Then on the same page is a pair of tables, comparing (12-tone) equal temperament (NOTE: the existence of other equal temperaments than 12-tone is NOT mention) with Pythagorean and Just for the notes of the C-major scale, then some of the intervals and this second table has a heading "Just Error" as though Just intonation had errors reckoned from itself! The minor third D to F and the fifths D to A are cited as having just errors of 22 cents each.

Then on page 69, first paragraph, the statement is made that this 22-cent error is much larger than the errors of equal temperament. How come? This 22-cent interval is not an error. It is called the Ptolemaic or Syntonic or Didymus Comma, having the ratio 81:80; it arises from the difference between intervals obtained by series of perfect fifths and those obtained by major thirds. In order to perform music in just intonation in the key of C major, which is what is under discussion on the pages cited, TWO D's are required, a comma apart, and if you provide the instrument with both D's you have no errors--the D in tune with G is a higher note than that in tune with F. The 22-cent out-of-tune effect obtains only if you refuse to provide the two different D's. Granted: this is an added expense and a nuisance on some keyboard instruments and you would break piano strings if you tried to tune some other strings (the C#'s, say) the second kind of D, but on synthesizers of certain makes, on electronic organs of certain makes, and on computers this is entirely practical.

Enough has been written on that subject for the last two centuries or more that there is no excuse for calling this an error. If you REFUSE to provide the lowered D, then you will hear the shrunken minor third and shrunken fifth and stretched major sixth (all of these much more objectionable in harmony than in unaccompanied melody) and the dissonance of those intervals off by a comma is the penalty for not providing enough extra pitches, or insisting on doing your demos on nothing but a piano. With modern electronic apparatus the extra pitches for just intonation can be provided, and the ordinary listener can play a cassette at home never mind what tuning-system might be recorded on it, so that makes just intonation widely accessible as never before.

Back to Page 68 again: Harry Partch, the energetic proponent of an 11-limit system of just intonation carried out to 43 pitches per octave, is misunderstood for the 7392nd time and credited with "a harmonium just tuned in the key of C. It sounded excellent in C, but dreadful when played in any other key." Unquote. As every reader or admirer of Partch knows, it was not in the key of C but the starting-note for tuning was G = 392 Hz. It could playa C scale of course but the G scale had more resources including 7th and 11th harmonic based intervals. Harmonium with a C-major basis have existed, of which Pierce's remark may have been more or less true, but that is not Partch's Chromelodeon!

I know, because I had two chances to examine and even play Partch's Chromelodeon, so I am sure how it is tuned and how the keyboard is laid out. Partch's book Genesis of A Music is so widely available now that someone in the publisher's office should have checked out the paragraph about Partch's harmonium or rather reed-organ, and made the appropriate correction.

In another pamphlet of mine entitled Two Experiments For the Price of One, which discussed the results of an experiment Pierce conducted with stretched partials such that the octave was stretched to 2.4 times the fundamental frequency instead of the normal 2 times. "Old Hundredth" in the usual hymn-tune harmony was first played using normal pitches and then with the stretched pitches, to find out whether the melody was still recognizable and what this did to the harmony, in particular to the cadences. This is discussed in Chapter 6 of Pierce's book, and on page 86 there is a stretching-chart.

I am amazed that no-one conducting this experiment realized that if you take the 12-tone tempered scale and project it into a 2.4:1 pseudo-octave instead of a 2:1 real octave, you obtain every other note of the 19-tone equal temperament with a surprisingly close accuracy! Over the range of two or more octave,s then, you get every note of 19-tone.

A confession: I was present at Dr. Pierce's lecture at UCSD in La Jolla CA where he played the demo tapes; yet I too did not realize I was hearing the notes of the 19-tone scale (which I compose in and have instruments for) until two days later when I worked out the calculations for the 2.4:1 stretched octave and the mapping of the 12-tone equal temperament onto it and charted it out. The probably reason I did not notice what was happening was that the tone-quality of event he conventional 12-tone tuning version was abnormal--additive synthesis very close to what was done on the Hammond gear-wheel organ of the 1930s.

It is a surprising coincidence that someone should have picked out purely by accident a stretch that came microscopically close (a fraction of a cent!) to the 19-tone equal temperament, when they did not do any experiments or investigations of that temperament.

It is a terrible shame that the most exciting and promising new melodic and harmonic resources are not even mentioned in books like Pierce's new work, and that in other books (Backus and Deutsch among other might be cited) the reader is covertly or overtly told to avoid them. Pierce's book says little or nothing about serial or atonal or non-harmonic twelve-tone music such as that pioneered by Schoenberg, and like most other books on this subject, completely ignores the possibility of using non-harmonic tunings (say 13 or 23 tones/octave) to avoid implying harmonies when writing inharmonic melodies or dissonant counterpoint in atonal music. 19th-century instruments and harmony get big boosts, while the new resources which the new technology provides composers are carefully ignored. Something is peculiar here!

Why isn't musical composition experiment and instrument-building experiment as legitimate as the physical and acoustic experiments Pierce has devoted his long to so effectively? Why have I gotten the Grand Runaround and evasions and alibis and excuses for over 50 years?