It's Something Like the Weather

by

Ivor Darreg

(1986?)

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

Exasperating parallel: many books and articles have been published about music theory and the possibiilities of new musical instruments and new scales for them, but nothing was done in the Real World to reduce these ideas to practice.

From my early teens (and that was a long time ago) I have heard people talking about improving the piano, and none of them seemed to realize that the piano reached a dead end somewhere around 1870, beyond which there could be no improvement without ceasing to be a piano with all the characteristics that implies.

Ditto for other conventional instruments in the orchestra and elsewhere. Worse yet: the orchestral instruments were not designed for one another, and it has been a constant struggle to force a balance in the ensemble, because some instruments are too soft and others too loud. Meanwhile, almost every other art and science has achieved spectacular progress during a century and a half, while the Music Establishment has remained freeze-dried, embalmed, preserved, and stuck in a rut.

Until very recently. The cassette machine, the cassette duplicator, the synthesizer, the sampler, and a host of effect-boxes. A few new instruments, and in some cases, ability to retune these instruments to other scales than ordinary 12-tone-per-octave equal temperament.

Any one of these things by itself was not enough. It is the cumulative synergistic impact of having all of them together, and the cost of doing things the old nineteenth-century way escalating through the roof and then beyond that out of sight so nobody can afford to write for the symphony orchestra anymore and they never will get heard. Incidentals like rehearsals and copying parts out of scores and interminable delays in sending scores and parts long distances to various orchestras, and waiting years for a report or even a stuffy haughty rejection, and after going through this several times, the scores and parts getting lost or destroyed in transit--well, even though that was the Only Game in Town for the last 200 years or so, that frustration is no longer necessary.

It is now senseless because of its present stupendous COST. Under contemporary conditions and contemporary lifestyles, very few people can be induced to attend a concert of new music--not enough to obtain any feedback useful to the composer. The people who would have been there, could not be due to expense and lack of disposable time. Or because of their distance from the concert-hall or school auditorium. However--and this is a Giant Economy-Size However--with the new equipment that can be contained in a reasonably-sized studio, even at home, composers can now get immediate feedback and now know how everything is going to sound, while putting the work together.

Certain kinds of musical instruments have not been produced simply because it is not practical to make them in quantities of a thousand, and they cannot be repaired by non-musical TV technicians or by shops which repair conventional musical instruments. The Patent Offices of many countries are full of these inventions which never made the market and we just explained why. But now with the new recording and copying equipment we can play such one-of-a-kind instruments and many people can now hear the resulting music.

No more sweat, no more tears, no extra cost! Take my own case, if you will: 54 years ago I built an electronic keyboard oboe. It still works. I played it in a number of orchestras and ensembles way back when. But it was not practical for mass-production.

So only now, at age 73, can I get it widely heard by recording with it. The commercial keyboards of today do not come close enough to it to duplicate its sound, because they have certain limitations involved in having to mass-produce them. It's been a long wait indeed, but the wait is over.

Or take the history of the Theremin, invented about 1919 in the USSR. In the 1920's attempts were made here in the USA and in other countries to manufacture and market Theremins, but they didn't get very far. The technique of theremin-playing is unusual and very difficult. back then, no communication facilities such as we have in 1990. So not enough people could get together and thrash out the many problems in putting the theremin idea over. Now it's quite another story: I just learned of a Theremin Network, or rather they learned I existed. With alternative communication channels and no need to mass-produce instruments, there is a chance of the Network succeeding. In that case, the existence of affordable means for copying tapes is what will get enough theremin music heard by the public.

The field of xenharmonics--non-twelve-tone scales and just intonation--has been stymied by two centuries because it was too expensive and impractical to construct the necessary instruments and keep them in tune. Now that obstacle has disappeared thanks to electronics and computers. Your home tape machine does not care how the instruments played through it are tuned, so everybody can now hear xenharmonic music at no extra cost. In this case, I have been in an informal, growing network called the Xenharmonic Music Alliance for the last 28 years. There is no need to confront nor argue with the conventional music world. They don't have to listen nor be bothered with us.