IVOR DARREG

1988

Annual Report

Three years have now elapsed since Ivor Darreg left Glendale, just north of Los Angeles, for San Diego. The dramatic reductions in smug and dust have been quite beneficial. San Diego is more "laid back" even though some people from East Coast Centers would like to bring their hectic stressful pace along with them.

1988 has been an unprecedented opportunity to produce new musical compositions and make new recordings of older music. Early in the year a Piano Retrospective was arranged for by Jonathan Glasier at a Lemon Grove recording studio. This recording has since been duplicated and some favorable comments have come in. When most of those piano pieces were composed--45, 50, even 55 years ago--recording was practically impossible and too expensive even to dream about.

So nearly all those pieces have had to wait decade after decade, silently reposing in drawers and boxes. The ordinary performance places and the pianists who play there are not often available to living composers born in this country--you have to be dead quite a long time and hail from Central Europe to be considered as a serious composer by the hidebound musical Establishment.

It is only recently with the growth of cassettes and machines to record and copy them that this dreadful depressing state of affairs has lost its frightfully intimidating stranglehold. By itself, that would not have been enough to turn the tide: the price of electronic instruments had to come down and their quality had to improve, before any composer could exorcise the Piano's Ghost.

This combination of new recording and sound-processing equipment and new electronic instruments had to meld together to permit any musical progress. The composer has been fenced off from nearly all potential listeners by a corps of middlemen for a very long time, and at long last, the composer can be the performer and the conductor and the recordist and the editor of what has been recorded before it gets copied and sent to distant listeners through the mails or otherwise.

Time now to say the Magic Word, NETWORKING. In the Old Days, there was nothing like that for composers or instrument-designers or for any crossover-interaction between those disciplines. The old-fashioned hierarchical kind of club or organization or association makes feedback and fruitful interaction extremely difficult or often IMPOSSIBLE.

A lateral network (i.e. no officers or appointed Leaders) has existed for the last twenty-seven years and is still growing. A new just-issued leaflet describes it: the Xenharmonic Music ALliance. Until 1988 it had no name. "Lateral: means the members write or phone or meet with one another at will--no rules and regulations or special times, and to one another directly, not through some main office. Xenharmonics, as most of you know, means a system of tuning or performing music that does not sound like a performance in the standard 12-tone equal temperament. It may or may not be tempered. But it has OTHER pitches than 12-tone-equal-tempered instruments have, and they are not limited to a set of 12 pitches per octave. To be xenharmonic, it has to sound different enough that most listeners would HEAR the differences and be aware of it. (It is possible to produce a set of pitches which most people cannot distinguish from 12-tone equal temperament, but which is arrived at by different mathematics or design, and we wish to exclude such systems from the definition because they will not help any composers to produce really new melodies and harmonies.)

In 1987 as well as 1988, Ivor Darreg has been exchanging many tapes with other composer, clear across the country and sometimes abroad. This will make for progress in music in a way that absolutely could not have happened previously. Composers could never exchange recordings of what they were doing at the moment before. Now it can be right up-to-the-minute. There never was communication like that before. the time-leg between composing something and anyone hearing it performed was enormous. Sometimes it was never. There now is hope for a powerful synergy when composers don't have to wait like that anymore to hear what their colleagues are doing.

"Critical Mass" if you will! That is to say, there never has been a time like the present when enough elements permitting advance beyond conventional instruments and old styles of music because widely available all at once. Something like a dam bursting. So many attempts to hold musical progress back for so long, building up a pressure that had to "give" eventually.

That's what makes 1988 different. Certain things, if you only have one or two such, can't do anything much. But it you get a third and fourth thing, suddenly and unexpectedly, Magic happens! The group of things is worth far more than could be inferred by adding their values. (Of course, the converse is also true: take one element away, and that value of the total ensemble disappears; caution here!)

In the case of the composing studio here, the effect of finally having enough has been amazing! Richard Koerner in Fairfield, Connecticut sent first a Korg Mono/Poly synthesizer a while back. This instrument had more dials and levers than it had keys on the keyboard.

Like all other commercial products of that kind, it was designed for the ordinary 12-tone-equal-temperament tuning and the manufacturer had no idea whatever of someone getting this synthesizer and then performing on it in any non-twelvular scale. Dollars to doughnuts, practically no owner of that instrument even thought its tuning-system could be altered or overridden in any way.

however, when there's a will there's a way: if one wanted to hear a just beatless 4-note chord, each of the 4 oscillators on the Mono/Poly can be detuned up or down. So it was possible to do this and take the 12-tone-temperament out of each chord that was sounded on a demonstration tape. Very tedious but for demonstration it was worth the trouble. More: there is a filter with two dials controlling it--one for ht region filtered--i.e., the passband--and another for the "Q" or sharpness of the filtering. Now, when that dial was advanced, the filter would oscillate. Turn all 4 of the main oscillators off, since they were tied to orthodox 12-equal at the factory. Use the filter as a monophonic oscillator with a flute-like tone (almost sine-wave) and you had, instantly, a one-note-at-a-time affair that could do any equal temperament from 7 per octave to 40 or more. That was done by manipulating another dial called "Keyboard Tracking," and that dial was never intended for the user to try out any non-12 tunings! But it was a wide-wide Loophole you could drive a truck through. Several models of older synthesizers, before everything was fitted with MIDI and before all designers went Digital, have this same capability, but it is NEVER made public, since the manufacturers didn't even know what they had, so to say, permitted!

If someone had written the factory about this "discovery," the makers might well have removed this capability from all future production, sot hat nobody could ever take that model out of 12-equal, the standard way of tuning pianos and organs and accordions and fretted instruments. Remember that this capability was never intended by any commercial mass-production factory and that all their consultants and advisors and standard books about synthesizers would never mention such a non-12 possibility.

Why is this so? Because composers are never consulted as to the design of instruments. Till the Do-it-yourself Movement of recent date, Specialization has been the strict rule for some 200 years. Composer were never to be allowed even to tune their own pianos, much less learn how, or ever be told that other scales existed than the 19th-century standard. (No, Bach did NOT invent 12-equal, but probably used it and a number of variations on it.) Commercial electronic keyboards are built with average ordinary performers in mind and the long history of the piano, which is just about 200 years old now (coincidental with the French Revolution of 1789(. In 1820 or 1850 or 1870, a composer still had much room to explore with standard pianos and orchestral instruments so there wasn't too much of a problem; but today as we approach 1989 and 1990, a composer simply can't evade the shadow of the Greats of the Past, the Hallowed Saints of the Pianolatry Religion (remember Liberace's famous candlesticks?), and the enormous standard repertoire of classics and popular tunes of the past. Practically impossible to experiment with anything in 12-tone temperament that hasn't already been done--more than once. Composers in the 1980s are simply deprived of a decent Pride.

It's next to impossible to do what this Report should accomplish. You can't write down the MOODS OF THE NEW SCALES! The reader cannot imagine what he/she has never HEARD since there is no mental Referent. Only the actual sounds on a recording can do that.

So for the last part of 1988 the Post Office and the maker of wrappings and sticky tape and cassettes and addressing labels have prospered shamelessly at our expense. Those of us who exchange tapes. It partakes of some of the features of an Underground Movement--the sub rosa behind-the-scenes feeling that pervaded the 1960s.

With the synthesizers and new recording methods and other devices now available, the composer can short-circuit the traditional performance channels--well, those channels simply are not affordable anymore. The Alternative Music Communication Channels now are reality and one does not have to be at the mercy (?) of recitalists and chamber ensembles and orchestras that don't want to play anything produced in the United States in the Twentieth Century anyhow. Some 30% of the conventional conservative compositions for conventional instruments produced by Ivor Darreg around 50 years ago--piano MSS., scores and parts, amounting to piles of paper were NEVER ACKNOWLEDGED NOR RETURNED by the recitalists or conductors or college people even though this was not unsolicited mailing--performances were promised in advance but never happened. There must have been five thousand composers who could have told the same say story. And this was long "B.X" (before Xerox) when copies of a composition meant staying up all night with a bottle of ink and steel pen.

The new 1988 Underground Music Intercommunication Situation is worlds better--it is a refuge from Intimidation and the Cold Shoulder of the Conventional Music personnel. The composer has the equipment at home, free access anytime, and sees it through tot he copies of the cassettes. No hostile middlemen stand between composer and listener.

Why shouldn't the composer-to-listener channel be as open as the writer-to-readers channel? Now it is. The traditionalists will not be bothered by our progressing in music; they don't even have to know the new kind of music exists outside both the Classical and Popular fields. As already stated, it's a matter of Pride! Why repeat what some famous dead composer of the past already did well? For that matter, why repeat what some jazz or other popular-music star already put on some notable album? Any composers' self-respect should prevent that!

back to the Korg Mono/Poly Synthesizer which was lent to this studio for a while: Many synthesizer-fanciers and most music stores that carry them, would kind of sniff at it even though it is hardly old--it has many years of life left in it and as said above, all kinds of dials and switches and things to control and shape the sounds. So many, in fact, that it can do things it was not designed to do at all--like play new scales monophonically.

They would sniff at it because it didn't have MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and because it was basically an analog synthesizer and had the input and output jacks that analog units have, not digital in and out. They wouldn't care that having BOTH analog AND digital synthesizers in your collection is an advantage because of contrast and diversity and different capabilities that each one has that the other cannot have.

Certain people feel they must have the Latest regardless of whether it is better or not. This has been emphasized by the number of times during 1988 when the latest equipment was demonstrated at various places, giving Ivor Darreg and others hands-on experience and chances long long denied them.

Also there were two chances to play Samplers, which are in a sense glorified recording machines. That was a strange feeling indeed--a sampler with a piano sample in it is like being at fifth remove from a real piano. A feeling of not having control. The piano was played by SOMEONE ELSE you never saw nor will ever see; it was transformed and converted, in that all the notes were not played, but those that were played were moved up and down in pitch to the proper keys to fill out the compass (not always true, but usually). You are RELEASING the recordings, not the instrument. This is exactly the right time to inform you: a Sampler is not a synthesizer--it does not make its own tones. Synthesizers with samplers built-in do exist, of course, but still, one is not the other.

Another paradox that several people have agreed about is, the closer a piano-imitation is to the real thing, the more critical you become--it can make an easygoing fellow in to a real nitpicker as the imitation (simulation, in Computerese) gets better and closer. This is especially true of piano simulation--more than in the case of a flute or banjo or even an organ. The sympathetic vibration of the piano strings not struck, when the damper-pedal is raised, is impossible to get exactly.

To perform a piano piece well, it would be better in many cases to use two regular synthesizers of different kinds and play the two keyboards each with near-piano tones and stop trying for that Perfect Mirror-Image. As a composer whose first piano lesson was in 1925, surely the writer has some grounds for making that statement. Then add 49 years of tuning pianos and organs and harpsichords and whatnot. Manufacturers and their help simply do not usually understand any composer's needs as opposed to needs of performers! The musical establishment is in the Necromancy Business.

The synthesizers offer certain controls which conventional keyboards never had. But there is no notation for them. You cannot write down directions for some performer to use the synthesizer exactly as you could yourself when trying it out while composing. That might explain this mad crazy quest of commercial musicians to clone the piano as closely as possible and thus stymie progress.

So here's this seemingly backward step: choosing to use an older-model synthesizer and now and then electronic organs and this of course looks like retrogression. Yelling for Progress in Music and then recording during 1987 and 1988 without using MIDI. How come? Not feeling compelled to rush out and nag somebody into lending a computer and lot of the newest software. Instead grinding out dozens--no, hundreds--of copy-cassettes and a few reels and not complaining about having older equipment.

Simply: what is now the latest thing in electronic keyboard showrooms has given up certain flexibilities for cosmetic changes and for standardization and competing with other recent keyboards on the market. Some of these flexibilities are necessary for progress in music itself at this moment!

The majority of new synthesizers are locked-in at the factory to the twelve-tone equal temperament. The older analog synthesizers might be more or less locked-in, but not quite that tightly: in the case of the above-mentioned Korg Mono/Poly at least the monophonic use of the filter-as-oscillator was not locked-in at all. Now with a modificiation which can be performed by one knowledgeable in electronics, this restriction can be removed by adding a few parts. Indeed just that is happening to it now, since it was recently sent back to Richard Koerner in Connecticut and he will have the modification done by David Rayna of New York. When this "Mono/Poly" was returned to him, he sent a Korg Poly-Six on which the modification had already been made!

This is very important. A keyboard which could only do ordinary 12-tone suddenly could do any equal temperament up to 60 tones per octave. Not only that, but it can stop between integers and do 23 1/2 or 27 1/4 or 18 1/3 or whatever intermediate point one pleases by being just a tiny bit above or below the exact fraction of an octave, one can get a stretched-octave 19 or 31, or a shrunk-octave 17 or 22--this might be desireable sometimes. The alteration of an equal temperament by having slightly over or under the regular number of tones per octave may reduce harshness or confer brilliance, or other wanted modification. It is well-known that octaves on tthe piano are somewhat stretched, and the stretch itself is stretched.

It takes about 15 seconds to alter the Korg Poly-Six from one equal temperament to another. The above-mentioned shrinks and stretches are almost instantaneous. This is almost the fast-changing-of-system offered. Remember, anything at all between ordinary 12 and 60. And it was NOT manufactured with that in mind. They just, without intending to or nor realizing it, left this wonderful loophole.

"Don't Fence Me In!" is the title of a new pamphlet by Ivor Darreg. It deals with the NEED right now to get outside 12-tone and that the near future of music depends on it. The chicken cannot grow unless the eggshell is broken! Stop admiring the egg. The shell was necessary for a while but that while is over. One fellow thought this pamphlet was important enough for him to duplicate a number of copies at his own expense. That is the kind of networking that is going on at present: people meaning what they promise.

Surely if the evasions and alibis and excuses of years ago are being replaced by action and empathy and understanding like that, the time to resume progress in music has now come.

The cutthroat competition in the conventional music field makes no sense. Why train everyone in the same old old way of 1780 or 1830 and ignore what can be done now and what is affordable and practical now--when the old-fashioned musical setup has prices itself out of the market? More than one person saw this coming back in the 1930s, so the Patent ARchives are stuffed jam full of thousands of inventions in the musical-instrument field which never got heard. But a war and other social changes and upheavals since then have changed living conditions and then lifestyles for so many of us that now the new electronic instruments, most of which are portable and do not hog floor space in our small dwellings as a piano does, are taking over. The piano is simply too expensive now. Most of us have to move every now and then. Have you priced piano moving lately?

A 31-tone piano is impossible, physically as well as financially. But 31 tones per octave with some new electronic instruments, that becomes feasible. 19 or 22 tones per octave, even more so--and even using a regular keyboard. More complicated scales can be done on computers. That means that virtuosity is no longer the Supreme Goal and Worshipful Purpose and Aim of all musicians. Why be a masochist anymore? Once you have fed a hundred notes into a Sequencer and have heard them come back at twice and then three times your speed, all those tiresome Czerny and Hanon finger-exercises will seem very pointless!

Those mindless repetitive routines can now be taken over by computers and robots. This is the new reality, no longer science-fiction. Why do music students have to imitate robots anymore?

The Roland JX-3P Synthesizer, like others now seen most everywhere, lent to this studio by Elizabeth Glasier, has a built-in Sequencer that can be sped up and slowed down at pleasure. What is on it can be played back in any of a wide variety of timbres or transposed to other keys or modified in various ways. So that is final proof: the Old Customary kind of religious dogged practice is obsolete. There also is a humorous aspect to the JX-3P--its two uncanny imitations of the Hammond (Gearwheel) Organ. That instrument of the radio soap operas and cocktail bars and funeral parlors of the 40s and 50s, was marketed as an imitation of the pipe organ and in the process drove the pip--organ almost out of business and whole generations of people grew up never having heard a pipe-organ nor realizing what it was if they chanced to hear it. The august Image of the Organ was completely ruined in the 35 years or so that the Hammond affair reigned. This was accomplished by one of the most aggressive advertising campaigns of all time. But this recent imitation of the arch-imitator, and the JX-3P versions are notable IMPROVEMENTS on the original Hammond sound--modern synthesizers do not suffer from certain mechanical restraints that the gearwheel mechanism (invented in the 1920s) of the Hammond Thing had. So, Poetic Justice at last!--"the Biter Bit" for once.

Before leaving this Keyboard History affair here--the 1920s' inventions and improvements by the Hammond Instrument Co. (previously an Electric Clock Co.) over the turn-of-the-century Telharmonium of Thaddeus Cahill--it was a matter of overcoming some mechanical problems and of gearing up for mass-production of this organ which had gear-wheels in it that tuned it about as well as the average-organ tuner would do--and then getting a formidable array of patents on every conceivable facet of the idea, and getting some powerful marketing talents and promoting it year after year after year till the last dollar of profit was made form the rather rigid mass-production set-up...there are more than two sides to this question.

There are positive aspects to it as well as the negatives. Suppose one sets them down in Parallel Columns: (Frankly, I don't think anyone ever has. While the Hammond Organ was the Only Game in Town and "riding high on the hog," most of us were intimidated by the tremendous advertising. But now, near the New Nineties, our vision can be clearer and enough distance separates us from its heyday.)

No more space in this Report to continue those Pro-vs.-Con columns, alas! But a future pamphlet could take care of that. There is an important other angle to the question: 40-odd years of exposure of the public to the Hammond Sound re-conditioned the public ear-away from the exclusive monopoly of the Piano Tone, and implanted a new memory-image of electrically-produced tone, which had never been in the public consciousness before. Whether to put this in the Positive Column or the Negative, is quite Moot as they say, but it makes no difference whether you or I hated it. Fait accompli! And nobody can put the lid back on Pandora's Box again.

This probably paved the way for the rise of the Guitar during the 60s and 70s, and the coming o synthesizers with actual electronics tones as opposed to the merely mechano-electrical tones of the Hammond gear-wheel machine. All these forces joined to displace the piano's monopoly. Ironically enough, this helped the Harpsichord stage a surprising comeback.

You may want to know, What has this History stuff to do with 1988? Why put it in this Report? Because you and I had to live through those decades. Because one thing led inexorably to another. Because I predicted in 1938 and 1945 and 1950 what was going to happen and nobody would believe it, but it has all come true even more fantastically than I had imagined. I am fully vindicated, and more.

What I dreamt about and waited so long for is right here in this studio at hand! Full reality and it has been recorded and copied. You can hear it right away. Not six years from now. Not buried in some pile of forgotten memorabilia carted away to the San Diego County Dump. Not in a "Musn't Touch" glass case in some corner of a museum. Finally, it is now too late for the most determined Enemy of Musical Progress to erase all the tapes of the score or more members of the Xenharmonic Music Alliance and/or the copies they hold of other composers' non-twelve-tone works.

Otherwise stated, the Xenharmonic Situation has spread across this country, to Canada and Mexico and abroad. It is now safe. Individual composers and musicians and instrument-builders and -designers are no longer at the mercy of huge impersonal factories doing things only in quantity. The do-It-Yourself Movement has at least spread to music. You can copy recordings cheaply, instead of having to make hundreds of instruments and rent concert-halls all over the landscape, copies of tapes can reach any mailbox. So only one of each new instrumentw ill start the new sounds off. This is the happy story for 1988. Certainly worth writing a Report about! It's the COMBINATION of recording with instruments and the freedom to design unique instruments without regard to the onerous constraints of mass-production and the enormous development costs a big factory cannot avoid.

Some people in the Xenharmonic Alliance are using computers. They don't even have to build instruments; they write programs. Literally it is now easy enough to hear impossible instruments. Sounds which could not be made even electronically by synthesizers for by acoustic instruments either.

Over the last fifty years the question has been repeated by many persons in many forms and under many circumstances: Why don't you sell this idea or design or instrument of composition or scheme to a big corporation or factory or organization? NOt too long ago, certain parties demanded to re-designed drastically the Megalyra instruments and to remove their new color-scheme and replace it with drab dark brown or black or grey so dark it could hardly be told from dead black! That after the 1981 and 1983 international publicity of these instruments in full-color pictures to the tune of 2 1/2 million copies of the magazine in question! And after TV stations coming out to the house in Glendale and putting them in the news and even on cable, and coming back to do a second such program!

Suppose I had let the putter-downers and the destructive critics and the wet-blanket artists and the Professional Intimidators have their way. Every one of them would have tuned back the clock to what already is in the stores and has been for some years, and they would have removed every single original design or detail of mine from those instruments, so it would be exactly as though I had ever existed and never thought up an innovations. Would you really rather I had acceded to advice from hecklers and Couch Potatoes and Yuppies Nostalgiacs? How would that have ensured your increased musical enjoyment? Or theirs? Some of these pests will back down when I dare them to do better.

Most despicable of these self-appointed critics are those who keep asking "Aren't you afraid that * * * ?" We do not get Merit Badges nor Trophies for Masochism nor yet for Giving Up.

Think this through a moment: A Drone Instrument or Kosmolyra or Newel Post or Megalyra is so different from the commercial mass-produced instruments that it cannot possibly interfere with the sale of ordinary steel guitars or peal-steels or the double-necks. Buyers of Megalyra-family instruments will still go to music stores to get amplifiers, picks, music-books, and whatever. By having the new instruments that different from the old, no interference with the people selling the old ones; but if the new instruments were mere duplicates of what is already on the market, then hat would be destructive competition and in this case, utterly pointless. Add to the total number of instruments in existence, or merely compete with what already is there and try to horn in on the existing market and reduce the others' share of it? Which attitude is better?

The Megalyra family in case you have not seen or heard its members, constitute an expansion of the Steel Guitar Idea. A full century has now passed since the Hawaiian fellow first tried out his method of sliding along guitar strings instead of pressing them down smartly against the frets, but unfortunately the Hawaaian Guitar has been used mainly for trivia ever since, and now allowed to develop into a serious instrument as it can--very few instances till just lately of people taking the serious interest in R & D on it as they should have. When I point out its kinship with the clavichord--which latter absorbed the concentrated attention of Bach, no less--traditionalists are horrified and express their contempt of me most brutally and ferociously. "You have Profaned Our temple and Should Suffer For It!" they say, with a Withering Frown. You can hear all those Capital Letters.

My investigations and trials which culminated in an AMplifying Clavichord back in 1940 is discussed in a previous booklet still available. Alas! This instrument was wrecked in moving and totally beyond any repair. Tapes exist, however.

At Jonathan Glasier's Sonic Arts Gallery in San Diego, since its opening, and all during 1988, the largest member of the group, an 8-foot Megalyra Contrabass, has been on show, and usually accessible to visitors. With hundreds of people from different walks of life having tried it, there is no possible doubt it succeeds in its goal of giving the Steel-Guitar Principle great dignity and depth.

No more Trivia! No more aimless formlessness. The depth is obtained by having long strings like a grand piano. The brilliance is obtained by having four pitch levels--sub-octave, normal, fifth above, superoctave. Each pitch-level has several strings--usually 5 4 2 and 3 respectively. Ceramic pickup magnets are used with low-impedance coils on them. BOTH sides of the long board are strung--one side for melody (solo), the other side for accompaniment. This balances the tension, avoiding too much warping.

Four Megalyrai now exist--one in Los Angeles. They have been taken around to various places and noteworthy was a chance this last Summer of 1988 to go up on the mountaintop near Warner Springs California, and play the red Megalyra (7-foot) through a1200-watt speaker system outdoors for the group who were there celebrating the opening of Summit Laboratories who deal with Loudspeakers Systems. Imagine, if you will, the experience of competing on equal terms with a genuine lightning and thunder storm atop the next mountain. Quite an exchange of rumbles. The timing was perfect, as though well arranged in advance.

The first Megalyra was built in 1975. The idea of a better bass and contrabass instrument had been germinating a couple of decades earlier. Several elements had to be put together in mind and then in reality to make it work: Long strings come first. A long and heavy steel slider, and alternatively, a pair of substantial wooden bars to hold in each hand to get the clavichord rpinciple without any sliding. Low-impedance pickups, two sets for each side. The pickups being mounted on the wooden board, they pick up some of the sound of the wood. A metal Megalyra, while practical, would not sound the same. Square endpieces, so that the side not in use does not touch the ground or floor, but stands clear of it. A special color-scheme, which runs through all the instruments of the group: Red sharps and blue flats and black naturals for the just-intonation scheme on one side of the board underneath the strings; green lines for the ordinary 12-tone equal temperament fret-lines--each set takes up about one-third the width of the board and runs for two octaves. Thus they do not interfere with each other and the conventional musician immediately knows where the conventional pitches are. Slightly variations in the colors of the fret-lines according to what color the board is painted: for example a green Megalyra will have black 12-tone lines and a red Megalyra will have orange sharps on the just portion and a blue Megalyra will have gray flats instead of blue ones. Thus these instruments look like Kandinsky or Mondrian Totem-Poles, and indeed have been exhibited as abstract sculptures more than they have been performed on. So instead of being patented, they are copyrighted as sculptures.

The stringing and tuning of the solo or melody side of the Megalyra is borrowed from the Pedal Departemnt of any large pipe organ. THe principle is first Chorus effect--there will be several pipes for each note, not just one (few electronic organs can afford this) and there will be at least four pitch-levels as mentioned above: 16', 8', 5-1/3', and 4': these footage indications refer to the length of the longest pipe of Open construction on such a pipe-organ. Thus the footage becomes attached to naming the pitches. Since the steel used to play a Megalyra is long, it can lie across all the strings, and the largest Megalyra has 16 strings on the solo side. So for the wooden bars already mentioned. On the bass or accompaniment side of a Megalyra are three groups of 5 strings each, for a chorus effect and to permit playing common bass-patterns without having to shift the steel continually--related notes such as C G c have their parallel groups of 5 strings separated by a gap.

The idea here is Compatibility, so that anyone who already has experience in playing a bass instrument (trombone, cello, doublebass, electric bass, organ with pedal above-mentioned, tuba, bassoon, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, etc.,) can play the Megalyra without too much to learn. This means many orchestra parts for such instruments can be used in practicing or actual performance on a Megalyra--No frightening Starting from Scratch.

The Drone Instrument has the same fret-line pattern on its melody side and a set of drone strings on the other side of its board. THe Newel Post and the Kosmolyra have chords on all four sides of a wooden beam which might be 4 feet long or so.

The first Newel Post was made in Los Angeles in 1975--across the street from our place there, someone had thrown out a redwood fence-post, 4" x 4" and 4 feet long. After fitting it with endpieces so that it could stand on either end or, if laid on any of its four sides, the bottom would be clear of the floor or table so that all strings would be clear and free to vibrate, it was fitted with bridges and hitchpins, and regular piano tuning-pins for the 64 strings, 16 on each side. (Regular tuning-gear-heads as used on guitars and mandolins would have been ridiculously expensive and taken up too much room.)

With the wiring for the magnetic pickups and hitchpins, and tuning-pins sticking out, obviously the full name of the instrument just had to be, THE HOBNAILED NEWEL POST. Southern California readers may not have been too familiar with two-storey houses having staircases with newel posts, but in Portland Oregon where I come from there were many such.

The Hobnailed Newel Post maybe though of as a Pedal-Steel without the pedals and the sewing-machine-with-bicycle mechanism, or as a Harmonic Laboratory for composers, arrangers, and even for certain music classrooms. The design is very flexible, so each Newel Post can be different. The Megalyra Family of Instruments was NOT conceived in terms of mass-production of Thousands, but Custom items in a Few Dozen Copies as ordered.

A Newel Post will generally have 12 or more strings on each side and be on a 4 x 4 or 4 x 6 wooden beam. It will not be overlong, since it is merely necessary to accommodate standard guitar strings which are seldom more than a meter long (say 39 3/8") since one will want to use wound strings on a Newel Post and the expense for extra-long wound strings would be out of all reason. We said 12 or more strings on each side to have more than one chord on each side--with four sides strung, this means that there will be enough chords without having to go to the Pedal Steel's principle of a complicated tension-altering mechanism and knee levers as well as pedals--one can have up to eight chords without needing such mechanical complexity and expense.

The Kosmolyra will be on a lighter beam with not that many strings on each side--at least 2 sides strung. Economy or lightweight version of easy hand-carrying. A Hobnailed Newel Post is HEAVY.

In January 1987, the Crafts Museum in San Francisco invited instrument-builders to send instruments to their show, which ran January through March. Jonathan Glasier took three of my instruments up and those of several others, and some memorabilia from the Estate of the late Harry Partch--then the Museum got the instruments back down here to their owners early Spring. A tape of some of the many instruments shown in San Francisco was made, and there were photos and considerable publicity.

The result was that with a hurry-up deadline and the prospect of not having the instruments for several months and the usual need to repair instruments after such travels--say 500miles up and 500 miles back--it was necessary to do a recording. So a four-track recorder was borrowed and overdubs made--this tape is available and you can order copies.

The steel-guitar principle allows for just intonation. Indeed a slide guitar with amplification is one of the most powerful persuaders for just intonation available! Amplification usually introduces what is called Intermodulation Distortion, and so Difference Tones are generated. With any 12-tone-tempered instrument the difference=tones are out of tune--seriously out-of-tune--with the just and 12-tone scale also. This produces a grating dissonance in what are supposed to be concords such as the major triad. So it was decided to do an overdub of all four kinds of Megalyra-group instruments thus getting full harmony and unlimited modulations into other keys with Just Intonation--something that most books of music declare to be impossible: that last is one of the worst and most shameful falsehoods in all musical writings! Moreover, this is Extended Just Intonation which includes the 7th, 11th, 13th and high harmonics permitting new keys and scales unheard-of before. This has been tried with small arrays of pitches but that simply will not do: with slide-guitar methods, any pitch at all is immediately available.

This is the right time to emphasize: that falsehood about no being able to modulate in just intonation is due to misguided and futile attempts to play 12 notes only of just intonation on a piano. It will not and cannot work because of hard cold facts about piano construction and design which cannot be changed. No need to anymore: for complicated forms of Just Intonation there is now the Computer. Why argue with professional musicians who play conventional instruments? Why bother them at all? Their trainining has been such that they become prejudiced against all forms of non-12 tuning, both just and the other temperaments; they have practiced their techniques so long that they would be unable to drop all that conditioning and training long enough to play extended just intonation correctly. So a composer who expects them to play new scales is making unreasonable demands, indeed, IMPOSSIBLE and outrageous demands.

If there were no other way to get a composition performed, it would be a matter of masochistic self-sacrificing and self-demeaning resignation--but there are now many new instruments and there are computers and there are recording machines. Conventional training utterly ignores the needs of composer now living in this country! Only dead composers can be well served by this 19th-century discipline. Are you man or mouse? Are you doing your OWN thing, or are you a CLone o the Dead "greats" of Central Europe? This and similar pointed questions become more relevant and more acute and more urgent as we approach the Twenty-First Century. If you want to be A Clone Of The Dead, I can't stop, of course.

But I am not going to follow dead footsteps on dead bygone paths. I didn't endure 55 years of frustrated waiting for that. 1988 is very different. 1990 will be more so. Let xerography make the exact copies we need, but don't slavishly copy people of a past generation and their outdated technology!

I am appalled at many composers having no pride! I have known composers who dressed up to look exactly like pictures of Beethoven or Schumann or Schubert or in one case Debussy. As though any progress in either music itself or instruments would be a crime. They actually kept on saying so. This is the age of High Technology, of Science and Engineering and radically Ultramodern Art. How can Music remain behind as a Nostalgia Orgy? Tons of money are spent on maintaining symphony-halls and trying to keep the ghosts of 19th-Century Europe alive. Even jazz and the popular fields hark back tot he turn of the century. They get their written notation form the Classical establishment and most of their instruments from it. And just like the pretended reincarnations of classical composers, they ape the dress or actions of an earlier pop-idol.

There is an unpleasant aspect to this: Many living composers will produce IMITATION Romantic-Period or Fake Classical music. Inf act, they are commanded an ordered to do so by their teachers and most of the music used as background for movies an TV is in that style. ALmost as though the 20th Century never existed. What a Double_Bind it puts living composers in! --Damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they refuse, they never get live performances on conventional instruments in concert-halls; if they give in, there is such a plethora of music by the Masters of the Past that it never gets all performed--nobody has the time, and only a small part of its is in the standard repertoire. So th Past Masters overproduced, and thus any imitating of them is overproduction on Top of Overproduction creating a Glut. In effect the performers say: We shall only play music in the style of the nineteenth century, so you may not compose in any style whatever.

(I know, I know: many of your refuse to belive me. But after 55 years of being told that your composition will be performed next week or next month and next year and the next and the next...into decades...goes by and nothing happens and their have no respect or courtesy whatsoever, you Get The Message.)

What a difference! In 1988 the tape machines are Able, Willing, and Ready to perform your pieces, and the coying equipment and effect-boxes and equalizers and speakers and microphones are also Johnny On the Spot and never talk back or say `we can't.'

It isn't for want of listeners. It is because too many middlemen use their Stopping Power and Rejection Power and Pure Cussedness to prevent composers being heard. Witness the dreadful spectacle of certain recording interests to kill DAT before it could get on the market, and to invent a Copy-Prevention Code that would turn off any recording mechanism if one attempted to copy such a recording. When the proposed anticopy code was tested, it failed the requirements--didn'twork when it should and did work when it should not. Briefly: a "notch" in the audio spectrum would be created such that the note a quartertone between a"" and b""" flat (at the top fo the piano keyboard) would be suppressed entirely in a notched recording to be protected. As though quartertones never occurred in any music as thought he pitch of all instruments used in standard recordings never deviated from the 12-tone equal-tempered pitches based on A=-440 Hz. As though high harmonics of lower notes never fell in the notched-out band.

To us who have been in the Xenharmonic Music ALliance for years, this yanks on a very raw nerve indeed. That the designers of the protection scheme could be so stupid as to believe that ALL musical instruments are ALWAYS accurately tuned to the 12-tone equal temperament based on A=400 Hz and never slip down in pitch at all.

Never mind that that scheme failed--it caused and will cause lots of hassles and other things to prevent progress in music and harass and intimidate composers and the public alike. Evidently the First Amendment ideas of Freedom of Speech and Freeedom of the Press are to be denied composers, even if visual artists and writers may enjoy them, as indeed I had those rights when doing writing or visual arts. Why is composing any different?

The greats thing about a home music studio with synthesizers and other instruments and recording equipment is immediate feedback. Better public relations too: You don't wear your friends out by asking them what they think of this or that scheme. You don't provoke your enemies into lying to you to slow your progress. You don't bore the Indifferent Parties so much as you used to. Oh sure: tradition-type composers who have pianos in their studios have already claimed immediate feedback, but the new instruments'; new timbres prove how terribly they were deluding themselves.

As has been said elsewhere (e.g., in Hidden COnstraints Upon Composers) the top notes of the standard piano contain more noise than tone, and do not sustain. The bottom strings are out of tune with themselves. Pianos go out of tune with time and composers are often forced to neglect their pianos. These things to not matter too much when a composer writers exclusively for piano. but writing for violin or trumpet or flute or the band or orchestra or organ, requires an uncanny skill in IMAGINING that those piano tones are quite something else than they really are, and years of this can be frustrating and misleading. What it amount to is a crippling of the imagination, a paralysis of the mind.

Only now, with new instruments and portable affordable keyboards that can change timbre and sustain high notes, does not realize how serious that crippling has been. So the immediate feedback from the piano keyboard has been more or less falsehood.

I am tired of religious people talking about noble self-sacrifice and renunciation of one's talents and abilities and who wonderful it is to be able to imagine things one does not have access to. Well, not composer has to be ascetic that way anymore--one can be aesthetic to the full measure instead. Patience is no longer a virtue at age 71.

No need to envy the privileged few with access to orchestras any more. Envy now gives way to fulfillment and sharing one's accomplishments with other composers and giving listeners the right not to be a captive audience in a concert-hall, but to listen to tapes when and where they want to and as much or as little as they want to. So this new electronic miracle of recording and overdubbing and new instruemnts is just as valuable to the listener. It gets tiresome talking to oneself forever. Now one can compose and know that others will hear it, and not be forced to journey all over the place and listen at home or on the run with a Walkman. This is what 1988 has brought. A wonderful year indeed.

Musical Notation has been a necessity for many centuries, and with the coming of part-music it was needed to keep the performers or singers together. But musical notation has gained too much power. It has become the Tail Wagging the Dog. We speak of sheet music as if it were more important than the sounds for which it stands. Worse than that: a deaf person would probably pass some of tte examinations at certain music schools in a Twelve-Tone Serialism Class for instance. They want neatly-written notes and patterns and case little how it sounds. The scores in such compilations as Das Schriftbild der Neuen Musik often appear to call for utterly impossible precision by the performer, and/or for something nobody could ever hear.

The tape recorder can help here. It has more than trebled my own productivity, and what merit is there in having silent scores in a dusty box for 30, 40, even 45 years? I did enough conventional sheet music for any conceivable need, by 1950 or so. Now with a xerox place in every neighborhood, one can send out copies for those who want them without hand-copying or begging some publisher to print them. The notation problem becomes very serious when we get into xenharmonics. Even for a scale like 31-tone which has a number of partaker now, there is no agreement on the new accidentals such as semisharps or sesquiflats. For a scale like 13-tone or 22 tone, even the naming system breaks down because it leads to absurd results. I simply do not have enough time to write out funny weirdo notations that would have to be invented for some of the scales we can now use. If I did write out piece in those scales, most other xenharmonists would not agree to use the notation or even to learn to read it. Take my new tape, TEEN TUNES, which contains improvisations in 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 tones per octave, one system right after the other. Who could possibly read its score if I were foolish enough to write one, without getting hopelessly confused? But playing this suite was very easy and simple--just go right through, changing scales in about 15 seconds, and it was recorded in one day. It lasts one hour. So does a 1987 overdub on 4 instruments of the Megalyra Group. This, too, was done straight through, of course the first part, wind back to the beginning, do the second, and so on, with about 6 minutes for each section. Just intonation throughout. Now writing extended just intonation when one modulates into strange new keys and uses an 11-limit (i.e., intervals have 7 and 11 in their ratio-expressions)--well, there is no agreement about whether one may use 11-containing intervals in the first place, and some object to 7, so there never will be any agreement on writing just-intonation compositions. It lasts half an hour and 30 minutes times 4 parts is two hours to paying to produce it. Of course intermissions between the pieces or sections, but still all done in one day.

The new kind of music simply is not all that difficult. Some nasty people want to keep it impossible. The problems they trot out over and over turn out to be pseudoproblems. Imaginary difficulties. They glory in their power to stop somebody. Spoilsports wanting to take all the fun out of life. Fooey on them! Are you going to let them deny you a whole new world of experience and new moods?

The only excuse for their opposition is that no written description whatsoever, including this report, can convey the value or significance of the sounds of xenharmonic scales as heard. Logically enough, if a written or verbal description could do that, there would have been no need for any music in the first place.

The lack of new instruments and the lack fo access to any experimental equipment permitting hearing non-12-tone scales and chords, has stymied progress in xenharmonics till very recently. Frustrated music theorists, who have had to construct mathematical systems and attempt to extrapolate from 12-tone harmony practice, necessarily came to the wrong conclusions. They have sometimes condemned tuning-systems without any hearing. Or in arrogance they have written down rules of harmony and/or melody for systems that hardly anyone has explored fully enough nor built instruemnts for! It's like walking to a grocery store and slapping POISON labels at random on every 14th can.

No, I didn't pick 14 out of the air: In the late Joseph Yasser's book Theory of Evolving Tonality,t here is a very long set of arguments against the 14-tone equal temperament, chiefly based upon the idea that 14=7+7. Since 5 + 9 = 14 and 6 + 8 = 14, yasser ignores those facts. The idea being that a scale should be divided into unequal parts. He also ignores that 6 + 6 = 12, and Debussy's use of the whole-tone scale is a musical use of that. Well, I thought, if Yasser could get so vehement about the alleged evils of the 14-tone system, there must be something in it! It must have some character or merit or special pizzazz, to command that much attention and arouse so much emotion in a book ostensibly about a 19-tone scale. I had to find out. I built a 14-tone 4-octave metal-bar instrument, and later fretted a guitar to 14-tone, and still later set a synthesizer to it (a PAIA monophonic synthesizer that I had modified to permit going beyond 12-tone) and overdubbed a sample recording.

Visitors have played 14-tone here, and find nothing less to be desired than in the other scales, so 14 has just as much right to be heard as anything else does. The public are being denied new experiences and opportunities through the prejudices which have no foundation, of self-appointed "Authorities!" Again, like religious and other fanaticism, taking all the fun out of life for no reason at all, and killing off progress.

That is why I have a studio and why I have been helping construct a Network of forward-looking and actively-innovative people.. With the Korg Poly-Six and Roland JX-3P and other instruments to be mentioned, it is now possible to forge ahead. Now I can do experiments and present faits accomplis to others and not have to write about them and risk being misunderstood. Just this last week, two visitors exclaimed--what they HEARD was so much more than what they HAD EXPECTED from their reading or speculation that it was overwhelming. The Network gains two new members.

Buzz Kimball of Contoocook New Hampshire had corresponded with me for several years since reading my Non-Twelve-Guitar article in Guitar Player magazine for February 1978. Later he came out to the West Coast a couple of times and collaborated with me in Glendale before the move to San Diego.

A while ago she sent me two Farfisa electronic organs--these are small transistor organs with a four-octave keyboard but the actual compass of each instrument is six octaves, the six octaves being placed on the keyboard by the coupler tablets usual on such organs. The organs are of the master-oscillator and octave-divider type and made in Italy about 20 years ago. They were very popular with rock groups and other small ensembles for quite a while. They work fine and do not show many signs of age.

Had I done a 1987 Annual Report, I would have featured them there, but I was much too busy with actual recording and repairing instruments and building a few and a very heavy correspondence to get out the Report last year. Now, there are some things the Korg Poly-Six mentioned earlier (check page 6 again) cannot do that these earlier little organs can do,a nd there are things the Korg Poly-Six can do that these Farfisas cannot. The result is that the two instruments make a splendid complementary affair. Why TWO Farfisas and ONE Korg?

Take the Farfisas first, since they were sent here first, and are older also. Twice as old, maybe. One Farfisa organ of this or another model is all any ordinary musician would be likely to buy or use. Most people of course think in terms fo the Orthodox Twelve Pitch-Classes Per Octave. So one is enough for that. I doubt the factory every thought of selling them in pairs! (Conceivably, someone might have used two as a two-manual organ set to different timbres and maybe some modifications, and stereo output.)

But in 1988 and afterwards for sure, our Xenharmonic Alliance and others whom we don't know yet, are going to need more than 12 pitches per octave to play the new scales. Take one single Farfisa (or certain other synthesizers and electronic organs past and present) and you can only have twelve pitches in one octave at a time. If you need 19-tone for instance, you will lack of the pitches and if you retune to hear those seven, you LOSE the first seven. You can't compose anything worthwhile in 19 that way. It will frustrate you, balk you at every turn. I know--many new synthesizers offer this CRIPPLED, inadequate 12-only of any new scale, but it just will not do. Why go to the trouble of getting into new scales if you are to be crippled?

If you need Just Intonation, you MUST have more than 12 pitches per octave ALL THE TIME. Otherwise you can't modulate to the closest neighbors of your starting-point, usually taken as C Major. With two Farfisas or two of certain other kinds of electronic organs, you have 24 pitches at a time ALL the time. Buzz Kimball, being a very determined experimenter, realized this and got them and used them for quite a while until he was able to obtain something more versatile and elaborate--he has sent me tapes of this newest experiments.

So I get the benefit of these little organs when I needed them, even though I didn't ask for them. Maybe his intuition told him to send them. They were sent without their original cases: this is a great plus, because it permits stacking them closer together for easy access to both keyboards, and it also exposes the little adjusting screws in back which tune each pitch-class. 12 + 12 = 24, so any temperament, equal or unequal, up to 24, and such things as 24 out of 31 of course. The modified Korg Poly-Six cannot do unequal temperaments and cannot do just intonation either. The Korg can only play up to six-note chords, hence the name "Poly-Six." The Farfisas could play tone-clusters as dense as you want--all 24 pitches at once if you were a real hard-boiled atonalist or wished to emulate the ghost of Henry Cowell (the tone-cluster expert of the 1920s).

The Farfisas can also play up to 24 pitches of Just Intonation or Pythagorean or any Meantone System; the Poly-Six cannot. On the other hand the Korg as modified can play both stretched-octave and shrunken-octave temperaments, whereas the Farfisas cannot--they are octave-locked-in. But octave-locking-in has an advantage: tune the top octave and all other octaves are in tune without needing to touch them. It takes about 45 minutes on the Farfisas to go from one tuning to another; it takes only 15 seconds on the Korg. You always can access six full octaves on the Farfisas no matter what the new tuning; as you increase the number of notes per octave on the Korg, your compass shrinks--five octaves of 12 and only one octave of 60. True--you can move that one octave far up or down, but only one at a time. Two radically different "design philosophies," as engineers call them. Neither intended for non-12 but fortunately modifiable.

The combination--having BOTH kinds of keyboards available in the same studio and also another synthesizer in ordinary 12 with timbre effects and an old monophonic synthesizer which has been modified to permit it at least the teen scales, and a few amplifiers and effect-boxes and accumulated odds and ends, permits a wealth of experimenting as well as serious composing equal to many of the newer instruments and studios because of this complementarity and other factors making true the assertion that the Whole Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts.

If you need Just Intonation, you MUST have more than 12 pitches per octave ALL THE TIME. Otherwise you can't modulate to the closest neighbors of your starting-point, usually taken as C Major. With two Farfisas or two of certain other kinds of electronic organs, you have 24 pitches at a time ALL the time. Buzz Kimball, being a very determined experimenter, realized this and got them and used them for quite a while until he was able to obtain something more versatile and elaborate--he has sent me tapes of this newest experiments.

So I get the benefit of these little organs when I needed them, even though I didn't ask for them. Maybe his intuition told him to send them. They were sent without their original cases: this is a great plus, because it permits stacking them closer together for easy access to both keyboards, and it also exposes the little adjusting screws in back which tune each pitch-class. 12 + 12 = 24, so any temperament, equal or unequal, up to 24, and such things as 24 out of 31 of course. The modified Korg Poly-Six cannot do unequal temperaments and cannot do just intonation either. The Korg can only play up to six-note chords, hence the name "Poly-Six." The Farfisas could play tone-clusters as dense as you want--all 24 pitches at once if you were a real hard-boiled atonalist or wished to emulate the ghost of Henry Cowell (the tone-cluster expert of the 1920s).

The Farfisas can also play up to 24 pitches of Just Intonation or Pythagorean or any Meantone System; the Poly-Six cannot. On the other hand the Korg as modified can play both stretched-octave and shrunken-octave temperaments, whereas the Farfisas cannot--they are octave-locked-in. But octave-lock-in has an advantage: tune the top octave and all other octaves are in tune without needing to touch them. It takes about 45 minutes on the Farfisas to go from one tuning to another; it takes only 15 seconds on the Korg. You always can access six full octaves on the Farfisas no matter what the new tuning; as you increase the number of notes per octave on the Korg, your compass shrinks--five octaves of 12 and only one octave of 60. True--you can move that one octave far up or down, but only one at a time. Two radically different "design philosophies," as engineers call them. Neither intended for non-12 but fortunately modifiable.

The combination--having BOTH kinds of keyboards available in the same studio and also another synthesizer in ordinary 12 with timbre effects and an old monophonic synthesizer which has been modified to permit it at least the teen scales, and a few amplifiers and effect-boxes and accumulated odds and ends, permits a wealth of experimenting as well as serious composing equal to many of the newer instruments and studios because of this complementarity and other factors making true the assertion that the Whole Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts.

In another field this kind of sudden emergence with a combination of things as opposed to any one of them alone or two or three only, is called Synergy. It is full of the Unexpected, the Pleasant Kind of Surprise. With too much of the commercial cloning, the results of assembling too-similar items into a studio is all too predictable. "Me-Too" and "Ho-Hum" are popular phrases used to describe that kind of situation.

But keyboard instruments and electronic instruments are not the whole story here: there are metal tubes and bars in various scales. Latest of those is a 15-tone set of conduit pipe and heavy water-pipe for the highest tones. The 15-tone scale was proposed by Augusto Novaro in Mexico about 50 or 60 years ago: for some composers it would have the advantage that since 12 = 4 x 3 and 15 = 5 x 3, there will be three tones in common if the two equal temperaments are started on a common pitch. Novaro took advantage of that by using 15-tone guitars in conjunction with standard 12-tone guitars.

in the back yard here, there are quite a number tuning-systems represented: 5 7 10 12 13 14 15 17 19 24 tones per octave. That is one drawback of metal tubes and bars--they take up floor- and storage-space, so are not practical for small apartments or ordinary homes. The advantages are: They are easily taken down and set up elsewhere; they will stay in tune for a century; some of the materials are very affordable or even available as scrap metal and leftover pipe. A set in such a system as 19-tone can be laid out in more than one design--thus the individual players may experiment with different arrangements of the same tubes or bars.

Some of the metal instruments are very durable--no worry about letting the neighborhood kinds have at them! The metal-tube sets are loud enough to be their own burglar alarm! Hard to steal them without waking up all the neighbors. Some metal bars here were saved out of old abandoned bedsprings left in a vacant lot.

A novel variation is the Tubofork: Take heavy water-pipe and saw a slot in it lengthwise to form the prongs of a tuning-form. The remaining length of pipe has to be just right to serve as the resonator-tube. These can be very loud. They are practical over a rather narrow range of pitches, mostly in the high register. But how can you complain about the cost of the material? Somebody throws lengths of pipe away all the time.

Of course the professional musician will demand elegant constructions with exotic and very expensive materials: A Gamelan of heavy solid bronze or brass bars; a marimba with exotic rosewood.

Don't be intimidated by these expensive instruments! The important poin there is that one can start right now with what's available at home or nearby and use ordinary tools, not have to rush out and buy a boxful of expensive special equipment. You may get there eventually if it turns out later on to be your cup of tea, but please don't let those mean old Perfectionists keep you from starting from where you are with what you HAVE and can afford to do. If you give in to a Perfectionist, they will demand more and more just like a criminal blackmailer, and nothing you can possibly do will ever satisfy them.

For thirty years I have been publishing Reports like this. If I had let perfectionists and spoilsports and dilettanti intimidate me, this Report would never have been started, nor the last, nor the one before that, nor... Instead, things have built up and expanded, and finally, 1988 with month after month of accomplishments and new friends and acquaintances and helping other people start off.

Over the last ten years, Buzz Kimball has built a houseful of bars and tubulongs and stringed instruments and refretted enough guitars to new scales to stock a music store. Now into electronic keyboards and using computers and compiling tables and publishing information now and then.

Glen Prior has built quite a number of instruments in spite of having to move long distances. Los Angeles to Rural Michigan to Florida and who knows where next? But he kept at it and has something to show for it. And writes compositions for them. And performs where and when he can.

Ervin Wilson of Los Angeles has a studio full of instruments he has built over some three decades and has introduced many others to experimenting with new scales and learning about the music of distant countries. As a draftsman, he has accumulated an impressive array of designs and charts of different intonations and especially keyboards and layouts for the tubes and bars just mentioned above.

Let's look at some local events of 1988: Jonathan Glasier of San Diego had been building instruments for some years after the example and achievemenets of the late Harry Partch who built up a whole new kind of orchestra and music-drama from scratch some years ago. Indeed, there still is a Partchian Movement which often assumed the proportions of a cult. Jonathan Glasier had met Partch at an early age and so had better knowledge of Partch's work than most people.

In the late 1970's this eventuated in the I.D. Project, a San Diego group playing together and using instruments similar to those Partch had built, for group improvisation--the abbreviation standard for Improvisation Development. Although some of the members had to move out of San Diego on various business, the basic idea endures: the proof by their performing together that improvisation is necessary for any progress and spread of xenharmonic music.

The 19th century gradually reduced, as it frowned upon, improvisation of the kind that was permitted or even encouraged in the 18th century and before. By the 20th century, the authoritarian teachers of classical and Romantic Period music became more and more opposed to improvisation or any deviation from the printed sheet music. At that time, jazz which permitted improvisation was sort of disparaged and so there was the polarization against improvising, generating ill-will on both sides as th3e division got worse.

With xenharmonics offering many alternatives to 12-tone, we must obviously explore unknown territory, and cannot depend upon the rules of traditional classical melody-writing and the well-worn patterns of concert-hall music to guide us into territories such as just intonation with 7- and 11-based intervals, or temperaments that bring in new tiny intervals and strange harmonies. Improvising singly or in small groups is the way to ensure that these new systems get properly and thoroughly explored. Using new instruments which are not tied to conventional playing techniques and timbres and constraints is another way to get sufficiently different from the 12-tone styles to be worth the trouble of moving to new paths.

That's why I made such a big fuss over those new keyboard instruments which offer only 12 notes at a time out of 19 or 31 or 22 or other new scales, and which will not even provide a decent just chord array even in one key. THe assumption of those concocting these crippled 12-out-of tunings seems to be that the innovators like us merely want to play old music in different tunings, not NEW music that CANNOT BE PERFORMED IN TWELVE-TONE EQUAL TEMPERAMENT AT ALL. Partch and those in the ID Project deliberately made some instruments on which conventional music is just as impossible or awkward as the new scales would be on pianos or clarinets.

Actually we don not make a drastic break the way Partch did. But certain blocks to progress beyond traditional music must be removed right now. It is not necessary to make the performance of old music impossible, but it is necessary to deal with non-harmonic scales like 13-tone and scales that have unfamiliar tendencies like 17-tone.

The ID Project, I was told, get to perform in various places and get some feedback from random audiences. WHen I was invited now and then (from 1978 onward) to come down to San Diego and take part in group improvising, I did get the feel of it and understood how a continual adherence to written scores and parts and performing only what was down beforehand in black-and-white would prevent any advances. My years and years of waiting for what I had written long ago to get performed and never getting the scores played were a powerful convincer!

Tom Nunn was a co-founder of the I.D. Project along with Jonathan Glasier. He moved up to San Francisco, but was down recently to perform at the Sonic Arts Gallery and some of his instruments are at the Gallery. Prent Rodgers was in the project with special instruments of his invention, later moving to San Jose.

A few months ago I recorded Tom Nunn's performance at the Gallery on Special instruments. I also go to see a new videotape which had a good example of his explaining ability--various instruments at his studio in San Francisco. Tom Nunn is now selling kits so that the purchaser can share in the building of certain instruments and that simplifies the shipment of these creations greatly.

The Sonic Arts Gallery in downtown San Diego was located during 1988 in a storefront of the Maryland Hotel Building, not very far from a large new shopping center and some other art galleries on the next street. A new location has been found by 1989 and announcements will come out very soon.

We should explain what Sonic Art is: The SOund Sculpture movement is itself fairly recent--move art museums as you know have been rather distant "mustn't touch" places where we visitors are supposed to go quietly about in hushed respect, and contemplate everything with eyes only and in churchlike silence.

The symphony orchestra, the piano, and even the saxophones and clarinets and trombones of the jazz band were frozen designs and hardly thought of as art-objects but rather traditional artifacts. With a new generation all that is changing: now there are many new musical instruments which are also art-works visually as well as sonically. The designs are getting un-frozen and you have already read about a few of these in this Report!

During 1984, Jonathan Glasier was up in San Francisco on a fellowship with the Exploratorium, which is a hands-on museum of science and technology with strong artistic overtones, where visitors may OPERATE exhibits themselves and are not a passive or captive audience or viewership at all. While there he built an instrument called the Pentaphone--5 pieces each of 5 different materials tuned in a pentaphonic, five tones per octave scale. Its unique appearance makes it a Sound Sculpture. So this is the integration of art and science.

Another spur to establishing a Sonic Arts Gallery was the collection of instruments that the late harry Partch built for his radically different orchestra, instruments intended to be SEEN and the musicians were also the actors and also to be seen as well as heard, not confined to a dungeon-like Orchestra Pit!

So all the shows at the Sonic Arts Gallery have been hands-on learning experiences for the visitors. The instruments in the concerts held there have also been for the most part new visual as well as auditory designs.

It was possible for a while to have two of Partch's original instruments on show, and at other times some of his emulators' works. Ivor Darreg's 8-foot light-blue Megalyra with 31 strings has been at the Gallery since its opening, sometimes in the rear, sometimes in the front, usually available for the visitors to play or hear. Accordingly, this Report must also report 1988 in that Gallery.

There was a TUBULONGS Event: for some time the 10-, 14-, 13-, 24-, and 17-tone sets of Ivor Darreg were on exhibit along with Jonathan Glasier's 31-tone and 9-tone Pelog instruments and Glen Prior's 19-tone aluminum-tubing set and a 22-tone UNEQUAL set exemplifying the srutis of India, made by Ervin Wilson. He is the originator of the term TUBULONGS for metal tubes giving a louder tone than metal bars, being almost their own resonators.

Before going on, it is extremely important to point out that the twenty-two srutis of India are a selection from Just Intonation, and bear only a small resemblance to the 22-tone EQUAL temperament, even though some music theorists in India did study and work with the 22-tone equal system. The basic purpose is different, the playing-style is different, the MOODS are different.

The Tubulongs Exhibit was not a fixed affair--some instruments left it and others entered late. The hotel building storefront was very narrow in proportion to its depth, so aisle-space between tubulong sets on the right and those on the left was narrow, and sometimes visitors knocked them off their stands with loud clangor.

There was an exhibit of Mexican instruments and other ethnic instruments, many of which were for sale, such as the Palos de Lluvia or Rain-Sticks--long bamboo tubes with pebbles inside them and little cross-pieces inside forming an obstacle-course against which the pebbles repeatedly have to fall all the way to the other end of the stick.

Pepe Aton Estevane of Mexico frequents San Diego now and then, and had brought his Harmony Harp, made in Mexico by Oscar Vargas who was connected with the theorist and microtonalist Julian Carrillo. This Harmony harp has 101 strings on each side, thus possessing 100 tones per octave, dreamily melting into their neighbors. (This is not the 100-tone equal temperament, for that would be inferior to Carrillo's 96 or the theorists' 99. Instead it is the 100th through 200th members of a Harmonic Series.)

The Fall of 1988, especially October, featured a Black Box Exhibit. My contributions to this were the Electronic Keyboard Oboe built way back in 1936 and reboxed in 1950; the Electric (not electronic!) Keyboard Drum for playing polyrhythms, based somewhat on the Intonarumori (instruments for Intoning Noises) of the Italian Futurists 80 years ago; the Megalyra of course; and electric guitars refretted to 19, 22, 24, and 31 tones per octave brought down on occasion while the exhibit was going, and since. Jeff Stayton contributed a PAIA Monophonic Synthesizer which was of the Play as You Build It Modular variety; some local music stores had earlier transitional synthesizers which they loaned to the exhibition. In the 1950s I built a Theremin which of course is named for its Russian inventor; this was installed in the Gallery so that visitors could have a fling at it.

The Black Box Exhibit culminated in a Hallowe'en Concert held in the space behind the gallery--a very reverberant echo-y hotel corridor, so we got a lot of strange effects out of the synthesizers with the participation of John McBryde and Rob Bell and those hard reflective walls. And very high ceiling. Jonathan Glasier played several synthesizers arranged in a row along the wall. We were of course costumed for Hallowe'en night.

Another Hallowe'en-time memorable important event was playing the 8-foot Megalyra at a gathering in Chula Vista in a large hall having a double fireplace in the center and nearly a hundred people in the audience, free to examine the instrument or try it, since there was no raised platform or stage between me and them.

The Black Box exhibit was closed and then there was a brief Minimalist exhibit, Arthur Frick's "Music for the Deaf" which was a subtle affair that some viewers didn't get--three cassette players going with regular music cassettes in them, but no amplifiers and no loudspeakers--not even headphones, so in complete silence the indicating lights on the machiens blinked red and green as the loudness-level of the tapes fluctuated--Seen and Never Heard. THe only sound would be the incredulous comments of visitors who dropped in from time to time: "What does that mean?"

The closing exhibit before moving the Gallery to the new location has been "The Underground Cathedral" by Frederick Abrams. This features a large stained-Glass window depicting a colored map of the Paris Subway system--Le Metro as they call it--but with novel words and phrases instead of the real names of the stations. It is accompanied with a tape of piano music and also the sounds of the New York City Subway System. The effect is remotely like what the Italian Futurists had in mind--the borderland between noise and music, crossing the usual barrier between them--the train-sounds are examples of what the Futurists called the Intoning of Noises, since they do have pitch. The exhibit will be on tour and has already been seen in other cities.

Now, back to some of the musical events during 1985 in the Gallery, and those at the new space in 1989 will be simpler.

The Wesley Brothers put on a concert one evening featuring a light-show--projecting slides, but the slides were kept in constant motion in time with the music--not automatic animation but actual moving of the slides by hand following the rhythm. The instruments used were unusual: a giant Kalimba with more than 240 plucked reeds. Smaller instruments of this type, also. The arrangement of the plucked steel reeds was unusual: each group of four or five reeds was in an octave-related set so that one sweep of a finger could pluck them singly or 2, 3, 4 at a time. The groups of reeds were not arranged in the conventional C, C#, D, D#...fashion, but in fifths and fourths F C G D A E B F# C#... Bill Wesley's explanation being that "neighbors should be friends" meaning that if you accidentally hit the wrong group of reeds next to the one you wanted, it should be a consonant interval away, such as a fourth or a fifth, rather than the adjacent semitone causing a clash of the intended with the unintended note, as on ordinary keyboards where hitting the crack between keys gives you B and C together or you slip off the C# key and hit D with it. On his Kalimbas if you get between two adjacent groups you will sound F and B-flat or F and C, not F and F#.

Well, he has a point, and this could be done on electronic organs and synthesizers, but it would be next to impossible to make a piano or harpsichord that way and a marimba would look awfully strange. He also had a guitar with extremely slanted frets at an angle like this ////.

Jim French used to live in Solana Beach near Del Mar, but now had to move to Los Angeles County. However, he came down twice to the Gallery in San Diego and gave lecture-recitals, featuring the various wind-instruments he has built. For instance, a horn that was really made of horn. Double-reed instruments. A wooden saxophone. A 19-tone saxophone. Various flutes and whistles. Nordic instruments connected with the early Norse mythology. Very good explanations of what each instrument was for.

It should be emphasized that these concerts and recitals were not distant nor remote nor standoffish--no stage, no stiff formality, no stuffy etiquette with its dreadful intimidation. My youthful memories of going to concerts and seeing instruments in museums that were in glass cases and roped off so that one couldn't even get close to the glass case--and everything DO NOT TOUCH KEEP OFF etc., and school-classes with rigid lessons and endless exercises that meant nothing artistically--those were NOT the Good Old Days.

You can't initiate people into music and art by scaring them off and compelling them to be a motionless silent captive audience not allowed to experiment or talk back or ask questions. Worse yet, this is usually done in behalf of long-dead composers.

Besides the specifically musical events at the gallery, there were lectures and metaphysical affairs. The ideas of hands-on instruments carried all through the year, and of course some of this will be done at the new location in 1989.

The Sonic Arts Gallery is connected with INTERVAL Magazine and Interval Foundation, a non-profit group for promoting new instruments and scales and music. Ivor Darreg is currently secretary of that foundation. Interval Magazine has featured articles by a number of people in various phases of music and has carried pictures of instruments and some events. Back issues will continue to be available, by the way.

[Editor's note: Interval foundation collapsed in 1984 and disbanded in 1990. Interval magazine stopped publication in 1984, 4 years prior to the date of this article.]

There was an event some months ago where an elaborate photocell-and-instrument array was brought down form the Los Angeles area and one could walk around a spot in back of the Gallery where interrupting this or that light-beam caused different notes of a special scale to sound, and dancers of course could do this. John Gibbon up in Tujunga also sent down other items that were shown at the Gallery. One exotic affair involved special bronze bowls from Tibet.

Let's go for a moment to the town of Julian up in the mountains east of San Diego where David Schierman lives, who has been installing and operating sound-systems all over the country for various groups. Last August he arranged with the just-opening Summit Laboratories on another mountaintop near Warner Springs. (Look back at page 11 for a moment.) So he got us four--John McBryde, Rob Bell, Jonathan Glasier, and me--to perform at that opening and that tested out a number of the instruments from the Gallery, as well as the Megalyra and my guitars refretted to the 19-, 22-, and 31-tone scales. This gives us confidence in the willingness of many audiences to accept the new sounds and novel unusual effects.

There are some differences of opinion among xenharmonists and among those who try out new instruments. There is a hard-core Acoustic Only sect which hates electronics and there is a more liberal group which will use anything that facilitates progress (I belong to that), and there are some who do as much as they can via computer in order to avoid the problems associated with manual playing of instruments.

I don't like to see so much divisiveness among the xenharmonic movement but people do have different backgrounds and as already stated, come from many fields outside music as much as they come from one or another kind of conventional musical practice. I can't omit this discussion of divisions in the field because it only emphasizes that the Xenharmonic Music ALliance is diverse and is not forcing a uniform policy on everyone who wants to be in it. THere are such hierarchical authoritarian organizations, sad to say, that take dogmatic stands or want everyone to practice only one kind of non-twelve scale and ignore all others.

The purpose of the present Report, just like all those which have preceded it, is to make people aware of all the new alternatives to traditional or popular music. To give people access to the latest information on new scales nd tunings and instruments. To tell those new to the field that there is an Interval Foundation and Magazine in San Diego which has published many issues detailing, with pictures, recent advances in the last ten years. YOU HAVE A FREE CHOICE! You don't have to become a routine conventional musician locked into a set of obsolescent conventions and customs of another day.

The 20th century is not the 18th or the 19th, and this is the USA< not Central Europe in the days of kings and princes and musicians in powdered wigs in subservience and obeisance to the whims of Imperial Courts. While listening to Tchaikovsky or Beethoven is part of your early musical education, you do not have to compose that way. Why be a clone? I doesn't make sense. Today is the 4th of January 1989! Not 1820. Not 1756.

But it would be most unfair for me to exhort you like that if I had no Advances or Escapes to offer you! Not just new scales. Theorists have been dreaming about them and calculating them for quite a while. But I offer New Scales + New Instrumnets = Practicality!

New Instruments Without New Scales represents the state of affairs right now for the synthesizer people and for MIDI users at present,and for some computer music because of the software that in some cases in useless outside 12-tone temperament. This explains the lack of progress in using new scales. To certain persons, including a few of the visitors to my studio, the situation looks as though progress is impossible. They claim that no mass-production factory is going to make retunable instruments because there is no demand for them. Since there won't be any such on the market, composers and performers will not have any, so they will not and cannot demand that any be made, and so there will not be any demand, and so on indefinitely in a Vicious Circle Forever and Ever, Amen.

Well sure, if mass-production were the only way to make any instruments. But not only can average home workshops make new instruments: they can modify existing instruments, especially the electronic ones. Tools for the purpose are now generally available. As I have repeatedly stated in various publications, if you make just one instruments of a kind, it can be recorded and the recordings can be copied as many times as you please, so hundreds or even thousands of people can hear a new instrument.

This is especially true of electronic instruments--they can be modified by adding new parts or making certain replacements. It is also true of guitars, which can be re-fretted to new scales. I don't go around whining: "Wouldn't it be nice if we could invent new musical instruments? Well maybe someday." Some Day is here; indeed it is in the recent Past already. I have done something about it and so have other people in the Xenharmonic Music Alliance and so have writers for Interval Magazine and readers of that magazine, and so have people put in touch with Bart Hopkins' Experimental Musical Instruments which started some time after Interval did.

I don't have to write about the future anymore: my predictions have come true. No, I'm in the futrure that I dreamt of and waited for, and it's like a miracle. The good news is that if I have done it you can do it now without having to wait.

The bad news is that some people have been disappointed so often for so long that they will not believe me. They won't listen to the new music and find out how exciting and interesting it is. They are afraid of another disappointment.

The new resources are like the change from black-and-white to color in movies and TV. The new resources are like taking something dingy and dusty and suddenly cleaning it up so it shines and sparkles. More than that, the new resources afford CONTRAST instead of boring monotony.

What's so wonderful about staying with dark dingy muddy colors when you can have bright new ones? THe ordinary 12-tone tuning blurs contrasts and obscures the focus. A just-intonation theorist who hasn't heard much just intonation may think merely in terms of smoother and better concords, but the dissonances of just intonation are also more telling, sharper, in greater contrast, so that resolution is more dramatic. Then there are some new scales which offer a vague dreaminess. Play the same thing in different scales and you view it from new angles, discovering facets that weren't there before.

INSTANT comparisons within your arms' reach are what this studio now has to offer--even three-cornered to multiple comparisons. No waiting to readjust something to get the other scales--both at once. That's the 1988 news. If you are a newcomer to xenharmonics, you have no mental referent installed of this or that scales that you have NEVER been allowed to hear. Therefore you cannot hold it in memory and compare it with the standard scale engraved in your mind years ago, nor compare two new scales with the usual delay between them that even new instruments impose upon you.

Recent visitors the other day were shocked at the difference between their idea of what a certain scale was the REAL THING put into their ears for the FIRST TIME EVER.

***"I always thought that... But what a surprise! Nothing like that at all!"

One thing a variety of new scales demonstrates is that the so-called rules of Harmony are changeable and even removable or reversible in some cases. The 17-tone temperament will make consonances of tradition into dissonances (the major and minor thirds and sixths) and so the major second can no longer be treated as a dissonance--you resolve into a second, not out of it.

Some Reformers in the past were going to Change the WOrld Overnight. They aroused resentment because everybody, in their opinion, had to go to one new scales and give up what they had. Now this is not the object of this Report. If you didn't keep what you now have, there would be no contrast, just a New Orthodoxy.

Xenharmonics offers much more than ONE new tuning! It is not a mere Crusade to make old music sound better. Nor is it the thorny, arid, jerky, austere land of Twelve-Tone Serialism. Different pieces require different moods. Different tunings ask for different timbres. What was referred to up on Page 27 about New Instruments WITHOUT New Scales was among the other things the sudden introduction of myriad new timbres to the tiresome black-and-white or rather light-and-dark-grey world of the piano; but that reform though very important does not go far enough. The so-called Rules of Harmony just mentioned above can be changed by changing timbres. A scales which would be useless on an organ (13-tone for instance) will be very useful on a vibraphone or marimba. A reedy tone considered harsh in 12-tone standard tuning will be just right for a scale like 31-tone. And so on--it will take many composers a long time to explore all this.

What happens today is that some composers who find themselves repeating what someone else already did, go in for more and more noise. (Some popular groups risk deafness because of that.) Disquieted Desperation.

We all need something better than Desperation and Fed-Up-Ness to propel us to a better or a more interesting music. Part of our trouble, of course, has been the proliferation of Distraction-Music-Background, the thing that early in the century was called Musical Wallpaper. The "Muzak" slogan a while ago of "Heard but not Listened To" sums it up all too well. However, there is another side to that: he more the routine patterns are repeated, the greater the incentive for us to revitalize music--and the new tunings will do so.

Now almost anyone can afford to experiment--that just was not so until lately. If you had no access, the new instruments or sounds did not exist for you. 1988 brought more access to more people.

Are you AFRAID to experiment in music? Very important question: and tragic because too many teachers and writers about music discourage or even forbid experiment. One of my piano teachers kept saying "Real musicians don't fool around with the keys"--and then there was a most unpleasant episode one day 51 years ago when I walked into a music store I had never been in before, and asked for an oboe reed.

"Where do you play oboe?" he snapped at me.

I explained--I was building an instrument and wanted to experience the orchestra from the woodwind point o f view, now that I had had 6 years of the cello in the string section.

He said I was incompetent to blow an oboe reed and refused to sell it to me, and must depend EXCLUSIVELY on those who had played the oboe for years to demonstrate any sounds to me if they were not too busy. He tried to make me feel like a criminal or someone who desecrated a holy place in some church or temple!

Pleas think about that: that was not art and it was not science either, for he was trying to stop me doing a scientific experiment having to do with the art of music. NO, it was more like some fanatical religious cult. I had not been initiated into the Sacred Mysteries and I was not fit to be so admitted.

Three years later, in another city, I was more fortunate. I bought a Chinese "musette" or whatever they cal lit--anyway a small double reed instrument, and they gave me four of the reeds for it--though of oboe pitch, the reeds were like bassoon reeds. So I did my experiments on double-reed timbres, better late than never, and was able to develop and refine my electronic keyboard oboe from a mere breadboard group of radio-parts into something close enough to be actually used in orchestras and to survive right up to now--1898--and still do its thing.

But what about all the other fellows who may have asked questions in order to learn something or to do experiments? Were they slapped down like that? D Id they give up their quest? Worse yet, did they sink into boredom? I'm quite sure mine was not a rare case. Music pupils are not supposed to THINK. Just go and play meaningless exercises for hours and hours till their parents and neighbors cry out in exasperation. Is boredom a virtue? Something has been very wrong here?

Contrast the dreary world o Czerny and Hanon finger-exercises with what I built in the last decade and what happened to it: I made sets of metal bars and tubes and laid them out in the yard. The neighborhood kids came over and played on them. No problem that these sets were in new scales other than orthodox 12. I had been denied access to things like that for years, but now I allowed access. If it were wrong to escape 12-tone tuning and try out things like 14 or 17, that would have been proved by everybody rejecting the instruments set before them. Quite the contrary--most visitors are eager to try them. The advantage of bars and tubes is that they are durable--somebody's ball thrown into the yard knocking them off the table doesn't break anything.

Last Summer when some of the bars and tubes were at the Gallery downtown, people would ocme in and bump the stands and one time, a whole set of sixty bars clattered to the floor. But nothing got hurt and none of the bars went out of tune. Contrast that with a fragile violin or mandolin or one of those long-necked Eastern instruments!

Let's take the fear out of music. Why intimidate beginners? How is anybody going to learn if they are told never to experiment? We have to provide opportunity.

This is exactly what I have done all through 1987 and 1988. For instance, once a set of metal bars in a new scale has been made, it cane b used to tune other instruments and to teach that scale. For many scales, including ordinary 12-tone temperament, more than one layout or pattern is possible.

Take for example the conventional piano or organ keyboard and the glockenspiel or marimba or vibraphone customarily laid out the very same 7-white 5-black pattern. Thomas S. Reed in Missouri and Paul Vandervoort in Northern California and a number of other people in various countries have invented special keyboards and layouts for 12-tone in a 6-&-6 pattern instead of the 5-&-7. Then some of them have invented notations conforming to such a whole-tone arrangement. A century ago, Paul Janko in HUngary (and later Turkey) devised a whole-tone-scale keyboard which duplicated the 6-6 pattern--i.e., more than one digital for each of the 12 notes. Some years ago witnessing the rebuilding of an old player-piano I saw the pneumatics striking the keys arranged as 3 x 4 = 12, i.e., the so-called diminished-seventh-chord pattern.

Now what has this alternative way of doing orthodox twelve to do with new instrumetns for playing NON-12? First the point that the above-mentioned bars and tubes can be laid out that way and put back in a 7-&-5 pattern without needing two sets of bars. This in turn means that a set in 14- or 15- or 19-tone can be laid out several different ways to find out what is suitable for you without having to make more than one set of bars for that scale. Or if you are building an electronic keyboard instrument, you can have an auxiliary keyboard in another arrangement and leave it connected in parallel with the first layout and they will not interfere. Why not? There's no law against it.

MOreover: this implies th converse situation. Using a conventional keyboard, such as is found on almost every synthesizer and electronic keyboard, for any other scale you please! Many would-be xenharmonists have hesitated or have entirely given up the idea of ever leaving orthodox twelve because they believe they cannot progress out of 12 without a new keyboard. All you have to do to prove otherwise is to visit my studio or even look at a picture of it! The little PAIA monophonic synthesizer will play 13, 14, 15, 16, or 17 tones per octave by just turning a knob, same old keyboard you have always used. The Korg Poly-Six mentioned near the beginning of this Report can play anything up to 60 tones per octave on its entirely standard 7-&-5 keyboard. The two Farfisa organs can be laid out with literally over a hundred possible tunings on their two regular keyboards. Waiting for the perfect keyboard could take forever. You might not want it, since it is extremely difficult to anticipate how finger-technique will work in a new scale. Excellent designs exist for 19- and 31-tone which I had a chance to play on. 22-tone is much more difficult to design a keyboard for an frankly, I would just as soon do it on one or two regular keyboards. Generalized keyboards intended for more than one scale have existed for a century. But the right instruments haven't existed very long.

We face a practical problem: I want to play in 15 or 20 different scales. I now have retunable keyboard instruments. But it would be impossible to practice on 20 different kinds of keyboards even if the ideal design for each system exited and could be made up. All practicing and no real music! What a disappointment that would be! I have guitars right here fretted in eleven different ways and no trouble going from one to another, but that is not the same problem as designing keyboards for those systems.

So I make do with regular keyboards intended for 12-tone,and manage to play them in all those scales and record the results. Now beyond a certain point which in most cases would be quartertones, it might be desirable to turn the problems of playing rapidly over to a computer or sequencer. WIth recording equipment and other aids that now exist, overdubbing or "stepping through" a composition outside of "real time" is practical.

Look at it from a performer's point of view. Each new scale would require a new nomenclature and most of them require a new notation. (17, 19 and 31 do not require new notations, although some have been invented.) If I want to hear 20 different non-12 scales, and I have heard them by now, i would have to write down that many new notations and have to invent some of them out of whole cloth. How dare I ask any performer to read them, when I can't read and play some of the existing new inventions myself? It's unreasonable to ask every performer to play new compositions in scales like 13, 14, 16, or 26. Some conventional instruments cannot do it. On a synthesizer I recorded some two-part counterpoint in the 15- and the 16-tone scales, and used a saxophone timbre. Now who could afford to get special saxes made up in those scales, when maybe no-one would ever write for sax in those scales again? But I could figure out how to play on a regular keyboard while the synthesizer was retuned, after I put an extra part in the synthesizer so I could.

Must I deny myself the composition because it cannot be done on any regular saxophone? Would you or anybody praise me for my Nobel Sacrifice of the Opportunity? Now really. I am very tired of those purists and spoilsports who want all music on conventional instruments and who give composers no rights. Too late: the compositions in new scales have been recorded and copied and no nasty mean opponent can erase them. And I have compositions by other people on tapes sent to me so they are protected against destruction just as mine are. Thus the Xenharmonic Music Alliance has served very well as a sort of Underground Network to short-circuit the possible opponents who would have wanted to prevent this much activity outside the conventional realm.

Keyboards exist for systems as complicated as 72-tone. A new notion is to project a keyboard pattern on a computer screen so that the pattern could be changed at will. There are keyboards whose keys do not move at all--they are merely touch-plates--while backward-looking pianists will demand synthesizer controllers with wooden keys having weights and rudimentary mechanisms attached to them so it will "feel" like a conventional piano-action. I don't know what you think, but this concept offends me in the same way that I am offended by those jogging treadmills for busy executives to put in their condos so they won'tbe seen jogging by the ordinary people out on the streets, or the stationary bicycles that other such persons exercise on, which don't go anywhere but cost more than a real bicycle that goes on the street to someplace or other.

The other kind of objectionable poseurs are those who denounce electronic musical instruments as "artificial"--well everything manmade is artificial--what's natural about the tangle of levers on a bassoon? Scales, including just intonation and the harmonic series, are artificial. On the other hand, the electronic noise we call thunder is perfectly natural and was around long before Man appeared on the scene.

More important right now is the analog-vs.-digital question. This has been with music for a very long time, long before computers or even adding machines. Music teachers have programmed their pupils long before computers, also. The human voice is analog--no frets on the vocal cords, no keyboards on our bodies either. Just an apparatus for producing a continuous spectrum of pitch and a continuous series of timbres--there is no hard line between speech, song, and instrumental music either--I mean, the Voice As Instrument as some composers use it.

To bring this point home to the visitors to the Sonic Arts Gallery last Summer, the digital instruments were on show--i.e., metal tubes and bars have fixed pitches, and jump from one note of a scale to the next with no intermediate gliding pitches--but an analog score was also posted on the wall: the composer Nicolas Vasquez has written for a chorus who are instructed to glide in a CONTINUOUS manner from pitch to pitch by the wiggly lines on his 4-part chorus pieces--there is no stopping at definite scale-degrees on the way up or down the compass of a voice-part--this works, even though some rules of harmony and consonance have to be observed as usual. Thus, during the exhibition, strict digital was opposed to strict analog. How many of the visitors "got the message" is unknown, but we did our level best explaining when they asked questions.

Musical notation is digital and has been for a long time, ever since the staff was conjoined to the old neumes. This has misled the makers of commercial musical instruments and their only concession to the analog aspect of musical performances has been putting BENDERS on synthesizers. But this bending of pitch has been in terms of TEMPORARY deviations from 12-tone-equal-temperament tuning, and snapping back to the Norm immediately. The Roland JX-3P has a strong spring which forces the bender-lever back to the norm of 12 and no way you can stay bent.

The Korg Poly-Six and some other synthesizers do not have such a spring and you CAN stay bent as long as you wish. However, nearly all polyphonic synthesizers bend all notes the same way simultaneously and there is no way to bend only the melody note. It would not be possible, for example, to bend only the melody=note when one is imitating the violinist's practice of playing leading-tones sharp.

No matter how perfect a violin-imitation might be, one could always tell it was fake by this means. Frankly, in most cases one would know by the excessive uniformity of the vibrato and/or the chorus-effect when one strives to imitate whole string sections. Some synthesizers have a "Random" affair--well, this isn't really random either, and one can often spot the fakery in that.

Some synthesizer designers evidently think that new scales are not important--that all anybody wants or should have is mere bending. Bending = Deviation from twelve, implying return to twelve, not retuning into a new scale that usually has more than twelve notes per octave. Many microtonalists seem to think that all they need do to progress is merely subdivide 1/6 octave, the so-called whole-step, into equal parts, or the semitone, 1/12 octave, into halves or maybe smaller bits and pieces. This, indeed, is what Carrillo and Haba and many others did. By Xenharmonics I mean actual use of something which does not sound like 12-tone equal temperament, and which ordinarily would not contain 6 or 12--more likely something like just intonation or meantone or an equal division like 17, 19, 22, or 31 which is intentionally NON-TWELVE so that it MUST SOUND NEW AND DIFFERENT, not "quartertones tacked onto the existing fabric" as one music critic put it.

This is a matter of self-respect and pride--not rehashing what some long-dead famous composer already did better! It is a matter of respect for other composers, allowing them new patchs and showing them virgin territory that has not been beaten down and overused to the point of excrutiating boredom.

I am free as a composer in a way I have never been free before. Why not you also? I don't have to resort to random permutations like the serialists who stick to the piano and the 12-tone scale. I don't have to go in for noise like other frustrated 12-tone composers. I don't have to attract attention by filling and stuffing conventional instruments with bolts and wedges and pieces of scrap and thumping on the body of the instrument or the piano-case. I don't have to abandon melody and harmony for video effects and setting instruments on fire. Above all, I don't have to crank up the volume till everybody goes deaf!

If those so-called Ultramodern Avant-Garde ideas were the solution to every contemporary composers problems, I would not have needed to write this Report, nor to do the work that it chronicles. I could have followed the various magazine articles and Sunday Supplements in the papers, and what I saw and heard at certain music festivals and concerts, and solved everything. Why would I go to this trouble if there had been no results? It's available now on the copy-tapes.

There have been too many blind alleys in the last century. This is, trends such as Serialism restricted to the 12-tone scale, or the attempt to stick to very worn-out melody patterns but freshen them with unusual rhythms. Then the attempt to call for extremely complicated rhythms such as triplets with nested quintuplets inside. Or even more complicated than that, and there is no way a human performer could do it accurately, and now way that even educated listeners in a concert-hall could tell that it had been correctly played.

Now that trend is really disconcerting: Why would dare to write these impossible-to-perform-accurately rhythms unless the unexplored SOUND resources were nearing exhaustion? But they aren't exhausted; all we need is to open the doors to new non-12- tunings, and the Xenharmonic Music Alliance's business for the last 27 years has been precisely that!

Moreover: These complicated rhythms and new notations for strange ways of playing on conventional instruments, and new ways of writing the standard 12-tone tempered pitches, and length verbal descriptions of what is about to be played, o the concert program or in a kind of appendix or preface (or both!) to the notated score--all these contemporary practices show a contempt for the SOUNDS and elevating the written notation to a ridiculously high importance; such that in several existing collections of reproductions of scores, the boundary-line between abstract drawing or abstract visual design and musical notation has been completely erased.

A few years ago I did some abstract art which had no intent or connection whatsoever with music. No resemblance to musical notation at all. But two people asked me what new composition of mine I was NOTATING. What scale was it in; what instrument(s) was it for? Had I recorded it? For all I know they may have taken by diazo-reproduced drawings and played them on their piano. Had I overheard their illegitimate attempt to perform from the non-notation, I would never have recognized any connection with my drawing, of course.

But this is a proof of a very sick situation: elevating notation to the supreme Authority over all music and DEMANDING that all music ALWYAS be performed from a written or printed score. And when the sounds become unbearable to most listeners, ignoring their objections. The Tail Wagging the Dog; I know, I said that on another page of this Report but I'd like to say it a hundred times if it would do any good.

An expert on notation some years ago wrote me a harsh letter telling me NEVER to write any more compositions that were outside the 12-tone temperament, and DEMANDING that I drop it and substitute the above-mentioned complicated rhythms and write out parts for conventional instruments such as horns or saxophones or clarinets or pianos. I will concede this was long before the present greatly0improved synthesizers came on the market and long before computer music was made easy enough for average musicians to experiment with. Well, he needn't have bothered, because I had not sent him something for his musician friends to perform--it was a transcript of what I already had put onto tape and so I didn't NEED to ask anybody to play it FOR me. I knew better!

Why did he assume I was asking him to do any favor?

In this case, as in a good many others before and since, I was very careful to avoid anything that would sound like asking any favor. My letter was pure and simple offering him some information--for instance, the fact that he 17-tone equal temperament can be written entirely with conventional musical notation without any special signs whatsoever--that my 17-tone piece could be transcribed from the tape by ordinary familiar sharps and flats. This is also true of 19-tone by the way. He was collecting examples of musical notation and I was simply complying with that published request. I knew very well that conventional pianos and organs and clarinets and saxophones cannot play third-tones instead of half--tones. I am the expert on that.

Nobody else who has seen or bought this transcript of what I already had played on a special organ before writing it down, ever assumed I was begging them to perform it. If somebody wants a 17-tone guitar or banjo, I can convert theirs to 17 for a reasonable fee. But I certainly have never asked anybody to convert a wind-band to non-12, nor to spend hours or weeks rehearsing and practicing to play some instrument in non-12 so that they could perform any of my compositions. I can do it all myself! Why ask anybody else to?

All I ask anybody to do is to LISTEN to my new tapes. And then buy copies if and ONLY if they want a copy. I'm not throwing any at them.

NONE of my Xenharmonic Bulletins and NONE of these Annual Reports have been requests for someone other than myself to perform a non-12 composition. I have to make this clear lest any new reader misunderstand. Most of my compositions since 1960 have been WRITTEN DOWN AFTER THE FACT: i.e., I performed them FIRST, then wrote them out so that listeners could follow the tapes recording along with the notes that I had played. I never expected someone to try to perform from my notes. However, in a few cases they did. But I want to make it perfectly clear I never never asked them to.

Please turn this around the other way for a minute: If I offered to play somebody else's 15- or 16- or 22- or 31-tone composition, I might have to learn 4 or 5 or even 10 different notations for EACH system. Well, that's impossible on the face of it. I've tried to read some new notations for certain scales and can't make head or tail of them. I could fill three pages with new signs people have used for such purposes, and dollars to doughnuts I don't know half of them. A particularly annoying instance is that there are at least three signs for quartertones which can be taken in more than one meaning. My personal recommendation is: Either number the notes of the new scale and use only these numbers; or use a typewritable code which is part of some software to cause a computer to play the notes.

Of course, when using the 17 and 19 scales and even the 31, you can get along with conventional sharps and flats and no new signs are necessary--practically some new accidentals do help in writing down 31. Well and good; but if I use one set of new signs, there are two other factions who keep scolding and criticizing me: but frankly, I will never have the time to use their signs and have to write every 31-tone piece three times over just to please them. You won't have the time either! So I play 31 and record it. Life is too short!

Do I continue composing, or do I spend so much time writing things down that there is no time to perform or compose? It's that simple. With more than a 50-year backlog staring me in the face--and much of that is quite conservative piano music by the way, writtten in the 1930's, 1940's, and 50's-- I have just as much trouble, indeed more, getting somebody to perform a conservative older piano piece as I do getting somebody to perform a radically new piece in a strange scale!

These authoritarian pessimists want to take all the fun out of my life and yours too. They demand that you turn the clock back to 200 or even 400 years ago. They demand that you spend tons of money, but you are not to use what this money or much less money will buy for you today! This is little short of criminal. It is surely misrepresentation, and misbranding of products and misinformation.

It is quite true that back in 1929 or 1950 you had to spend much more money than now to experiment with new tunings, and you couldn't try 40 different new scales on one instrument at no extra cost, the way you can now. Authors of books written back in 1882 or 1910 are excused, of course, for not being able to predict the future I am living in right now.

But there is NO EXCUSE for present-day writers and teachers repeating these items which are no longer the case at all.

The books just mentioned were primarily written, NOT to help a single living composer or to suggest anything to a builder of instruments like you or me. They were written only to help those who wanted OLD music to sound somewhat better. Or in some really annoying instances, to attempt to prove it was no use and no point going beyond the sacred 12 equally-spaced tones per octave. To prevent and reverse any music progress that might accidentally happen.

I am not advocating just one system of tuning beyond 12. I offer you the most variegated palette of new resources imaginable. Free for the asking. My expenses are now transportation and postage and copying charges and copy-cassettes. Nothing at all like what it would have ten or twenty years ago, and much that was impossible then.

That has been another difficulty till now: if you spent all your resources--money and time and trouble--one one new tuning such as 31 or meantone or 19 or 24 or Just Intonation, then to justify this expenditure on DEDICATED one-system-only resources, you had to DEFEND your agonizing painful choice against other people in xenharmonics as well as those outside it. You couldn't be eclectic as anyone can be now. So internecine divisive polemics and battles have raged. That's why I decided recently to give our name--Glen Prior's, his friends', and mine, the Xenharmonic Music Alliance--to the growing and alive-and-well informal movement or lateral network of people which has now existed for almost 28 years, and thus keep that name and the idea of alliance alive after we had to leave the Los Angeles Area 4 or 5 years ago. Since everyone can now afford at least to LISTEN TO a long list of non-twelve-tone tunings which includes everything from several varieties of Just Intonation to the non-harmonic or deliberately inharmonic scales like 13-tone equal temperament, there is no longer any reason for the users of any one tuning-system to put down or fight against he users of any other.

Since the xenharmonics has been used by quite a number of persons during the last twenty years and has appeared in print a number of times in many different places, it would be a good idea for me to define its scope here: Xenharmonics is anything that does not sound like ordinary 12-tone equal temperament to average music-listeners under normal conditions. It includes Just Intonation of all kinds--limited and extended. Therefore it includes Partch's system. It includes most music performed in temperaments other than 12-equal. It does not matter whether this is new or existing music so long as it does not sound like 12-equal in the particular performance.

Sure: a whole bunch of pestiferous legalistic nitpickers are descending on me right as I write this. Gray areas do exist: one would be, using 12 notes of Pythagorean. Is that xenharmonic? Probably not--listeners ordinarily could not tell the difference. 12 note forming a series of fifths, out of 53 or 41 or 29? Same answer as above. (You could juggle your choice of notes to make a difference, but this is deliberate stacking of the cards.) And what if you go to someone's home or recital hall and play their piano when it is horribly out of tune. Is that xenharmonic? I have the same privileges as the lawyer or theorist out there who would ask such a loaded question: did you keep on playing after the first few chords? If you stopped, you had no intention of playing xenharmonically, but if you kept on playing after you heard the terrible out-of-tune notes, then it was xenharmonic because you were willing to play them. Were others listening?

How many blue notes or bends do you have to sing or play before it is xenharmonic? Well, how many angels can stand on the point of You Know What? This is also legalism. Being of Irish descent, I have the privilege of answering one question with another. ANother point: the 5-, 7-, 9- and 10-tone equal temperaments are xenharmonic, but certainly not microtonal. I do not want the word or prefix micro- used for large intervals like that. I would like microtones to begin at or after 12-per-octave, but do not have enough moral support for that, so I avoid "microtonal" as much as possible--during the last 12 years.

I have been discussing the use of METACHROMATIC for scales just beyond 12 that have unusual melodic effects: 13, 14, 15... and I have received considerable approval for this. This was a recent coinage and discussion with several xenharmonists and others outside the Xenharmonic Musical ALliance, so belongs here in the 1988 News.

I didn't quite get to the very thorny subject of notation and nomenclature for Just Intonation and systems which are very close to it--so close that most listeners could never hear the difference outside some special acoustic laboratory. Never on any recording. Not in usual concert-halls because of the noise levels that cannot be avoided there.

The customary musical notation does not make any provision for just (untempered, ratio 4:5) major thirds or other intervals derived from them. E.g. just major and minor sixths, augmented fifths, minor thirds, smaller major seconds (ratio 9:10). Nor does it provide for septimal intervals whose ratios contain the prime factor 7. It implies that all such intervals are Pythagorean, derived from an infinite series of perfect untempered fifths (ratio 2:3). However, it works for many systems which have tempered (i.e., distorted, altered) fifths, such as the 19-tone equal temperament, the ordinary 12-tone, and various temperaments called the Meantone Family or some similar name. It also works for temperaments like 17-tone.

I can't go into all the historical and other reasons why that is so in this Report, but I have discussed it elsewhere and will in the future. (See the article on 31-tone and Meantone in Xenharmonic Bulletin Number 9.) Not only does the customary staff-notation ignore intervals derived from just untempered major thirds, but he usual name-system also ignores them and has no way of dealing with them. A main reason for putting this stuff in my present Report is that Harry Partch, in disgust with that situation, simply threw out both the staff-notation and the names like F and F-sharp and A-flat, and used ratio-fractions in two different senses--both as names of intervals and names of absolute pitches, combining the incompatible solfeggio-syllable-systems of the English and Germanic countries (our movable DO RE MI) and the fixed-solfeggio-syllable systems of the Latin countries (their DO is always our C, their RE is always our D, &c.). He created new problems while solving the old ones. It works for his special system 43-tone just untempered system, but does not work for many other systems just and tempered, that I use and most of us in the Xenharmonic Music Alliance and elsewhere use.

I get scolded and criticized constantly by devotees of Partch who think I am committing some sin or breach of etiquette by not using Partch's manner of writing ratios always and everywhere, and by continuing to use ordinary names when communicating with ordinary musicians who usually have not studied Partch's book and for tunings which Partch did not want to start, and he said so. If Partch had ordered me to use his ratios all the time and in his manner, he could have written this to me in his letters to me or said something about it when he called me on the phone a long time ago.

He defined "octave" as a distance on a standard keyboard, not an interval. But I follow general practice in all our countries and languages I know about, where "octave" means an interval whose ratio he wrote 2/1 and I may sometimes do so, usually as 1:2 or 2:1 in the manner in which people using ordinary school arithmetic write ratios. I am tired of being scolded about this. It does not mean any disrespect for Partch, and my friends know that. He had every right to create a special terminology, so that he could teach the players of his pieces to perform them as he wanted. But this does not mean I have to follow everything he said and did.

I have to communicate with regular musicians and listeners and the music I have produced is not in his special system but it often is in just intonation and may be extended just intonation similar to his array of pitches. However my style and use of just pitches is different, and I do not limit myself to acoustic instruments as he did; and I do not write music-dramas or deal with visual stage performances as he did; and the instruments I build are different from his. I am grateful for the change in the evolution of music and the other results of his long struggle against the musical establishment and untold grinding opposition he had to face and eventually overcame. All xenharmonists owe him some respect for his never giving up. But respecting someone or being grateful does not mean cloning.

It wouldn't help his memory any if I merely imitated slavishly, or if I abstained from all ordinary 12-tone-tempered and the many other tempered kinds of music. The "purists" in music as in other arts are not very kind or charitable. I don't get medals for masochism or humiliation or suppressing my talents or me-too-ism.

With new instruments and recording methods I don't have to write everything down, and I don't need to create all kinds of new notations for performers since I can play my own compositions myself. So I need notation only for occasional written examples of new melodies or harmonies, and new names when answering questions about theory and how to use new instruments in new scales.

I think it is much more worthwhile to spend my time composing and performing and recording and demonstrating and lecturing than trying to invent new ways of writing things and then have no time to make sounds, or to place notation above sounds. If you never heard music in a scale such as 13 or 22, you have no mental image of the sound, and the notation will call up what you have heard on ordinary instruments, and that at least subconsciously suggests to you that nothing really has happened. This has happened to over a hundred persons that I know about.

Fortunately there is a way around it for the new temperaments at least: now that a number of people, myself included, have published the data for refretting guitars and other fretted instruments, and some of us have actually refretted many guitars for others, the now-standard guitar tablatures and chord-diagrams and chord-symbols are NOT tied down to 12 frets per octave. A mere statement of how the guitar is fretted, or a few trivial additions to diagrams and chord symbols, enable performers to switch to a new fretting without even bothering with new names and symbols for accidentals and such problems as the F-sharp being lower than G-flat in 19 but being higher than G-flat in 17. The relative finger-positions for a chord or the next note on a fretted guitar are close to the old familiar positions, so it is not like switching to a new keyboard from the present one, however clever the new keyboard design might be.

With the tablature for fretted instruments in which the staff-lines stand for the strings (therefore the number of lines is the number of strings on that instrument) and the numerals on those lines indicating which fret to use (zero for the open string), you will never run out of numbers. 13 or 31 is just as easy to tabulate as 12. Atonal composers please take note! This is impartial.

For computer music some kind of typewritable code is necessary, so why spend additional money and time writing out in notation what you will have to code on a typewriter=style keyboard on the computer anyhow? Why do everything TWICE? You may want to have some special instrument beside you, on which to try out the new sounds, but still, no need to write out those sound-experiments as you do them, since surely anybody that has a computer can afford a cassette recorder.

Again: many people getting into computer music did not enter it from traditional piano music or other conventional instrument=playing. It is a waste of their time to compel them to go back and study the piano, which si NOT a 20th-century instrument. Left to do their own thing their own way, they can be at home on computer keyboards and the newest electronic instruments. Why confuse them?

One reason for getting this Report out now is that I just met a number of people who came here and to whom I played new scales including just intonation and various temperaments, both on the keyboards sent to me and on the refretted guitars and the fretless Megalyra and Newel Post and Drone Instrument. Or I put on tapes. They commented without any prompting by me and without my stacking the cards or tricking them into wanted answers or remarks, that they felt this or that entirely new SENSATION when listening or trying out an instrument here.

Surely this is News. More than one person. Quite a number in fact. Otherwise, why would I have continued so long? Why would other people have entered the xenharmonic field, often without knowing about the network I have been involved with were doing? Some people accidentally stumble on the new sensation from new musical chords or intervals or melodies that cannot be played on a piano or organ.

One thing already subliminally changing the status quo is the Touch-Tone telephone buttons which sound a whole series of intervals which deliberately were designed to be outside any ordinary scale. Even Master Iconoclast and Trailblazer Harry Partch did not invent the Touch-Tone intervals! And now virtually every reader of this Report has heard or used them. It's too late to go back. Since your phone number is now a two-part melody with often dissonant accompaniment, that melody is your New Name! Guaranteed to be xenharmonic.

While on the subject of Partch, he is said to have burnt up all his coventional compositions during the 1930's--i.e., he wanted to start a whole new system of music strictly from Scratch. Others like me are sometimes accused of having done this, or I have been accused of mounting some Grandiose Crusade to Abolish everything that went before me in music. Others in our Alliance have been similarly and just as falsely accused. No, we didn't burn anything up. That is why the first page of this Report chronicles the new recording of the Early Piano Pieces Retrospective which goes back as far as 1934. Everything I ever wrote conventionally is still available in 1989 and will be in 1990, &c.

Moreover I just completed 49 years of tuning pianos and organs the same way other ordinary tuners do it. I do not have to abolish in order to promote the new.

It is all too easy to turn newcomers off! All you have to do is spend more time talking about theory than playing instruments, and bringing up fractions and ratios and exponents and roots and powers and they will never come back to see you. This is finally, after two centuries, our opportunity to have the xenharmonic movement grow and to help composers do something different, and escape the dull boring ruts they have been in. Please don't spoil it! We need more people. Most of these new people hate mathematics and have terrible memories of their grade- and high-school days. I have attempted to do something about that too, the Numaudo System which is intended among other things to alleviate Math Anxiety. I have tapes and pamphlets about that.

Most people have been misinformed on the subject of temperaments and just intonation and book after book has repeated this misinformation without checking the facts. There is a sort of excuse for the books: the equipment to demonstrate a variety of new tunings was not available before the 1980's--until now it cost too much, tuning was prohibitively expensive if it could be done at all, and nobody seems to have known about the MOODS until I did some composing the last few years--and even then now until I could record the compositions properly in a number of different systems.

You have to understand the financial problems that faced anyone entering the field till very recently. I would not be able even now, except that so much equipment has been lent and donated and Interval Foundation was established in San Diego several years ago and I was invited to move here. I might have lost everything when my former place in the Los Angeles area was sold out from under me. It was a cliffhanger rescue in the nick of time. The problem facing investigators was that if you got one non-twelve instrument, it took all your available funds and all your available floor-space and loads of your time tuning it and maintaining it, so no more money or time was available for any other tuning. Therefore you had to defend, out of Wounded Pride, your agonizing choice of just one non-12 system. If you chose 19 you could not afford 22 or 31, so you have to talk against them, or vice-versa.

If you spent money and time and trouble on Just Intonation, then you, out of pride and exhaustion, had to progagandize against all temperaments equal and unequal and those who used them. Just natural human behavior--nothing so unique about it. This has compounded the amount of misinformation about xenharmonics in the press of course. This financial obstacle at last has fallen. You can make instruments out of scraps; a number of people do. You can modify instruments or have it done. Refretted guitars need not cost much more than regular 12-tone ones.

Having just one non-twelve system and comparing it only with 12-tone equal temperament and no other comparisons is a very shallow and one-sided approach and it happily is no longer necessary. Still you may want to know, WHY? Why more than one non-twelve system? One new reason is the MOODS just mentioned above. There are many theoretically-possible tunings. We do not claim that there are that many NEW MOODS, but the moods of the equal temperaments 13 through 24, and 31, 34, 36, 41 and a few others, are very important and FOR MOST OF YOU, BRAND-NEW, UNHEARD-OF. Say at least 20, counting a few unequal temperaments and the several important "limits" in just intonation--that is, restricted and extended forms of just intonation which do or do not admit the intervals derived from major thirds, subminor sevenths, eleventh-harmonic-based, and so on. All these affairs, just and tempered, afford experiences you never have heard. Remember when black-and-white TV gave way to Color? It's even more dramatic than that.

My problem has been that I could not enable others to hear the new moods until 1988. So some people denied their existence. Well they can't spoil our fun, yours or mine, anymore because too many people have now had the mood experience. That was the chief motivation for preparing this Report.

Another factor, "the frosting on the cake," so to speak, has been the new control over TIMBRE. This is very important for xenharmonics since timbre changes the so-called rules of harmony. There has been considerable criticisim of the non-harmonic 13-tone temperament for example. Well if you put 13-tone on an organ and try to play a Bach Chorale (this actually has been done by a couple of computer experts) it does come out rather raucous. But come over here and try my 13-tone aluminum-bar set which does not have any harmonic partials in its tones and the usual laws of harmony have been repealed or suspended. A computer musician or a synthesizer played could no doubt do the same thing. But a 13-tone accordion if such existed, would send even a hardened heavy-metal fan running for cover!

For each tuning-system there will be ideal and desirable timbres and other timbres one probably will prefer not to use. But until just lately, there was no control over timbre--the piano manufacturer gave you a special tone-quality which evolved to make the 12-tone equal temperament sound better, and you could not get any other from anybody's piano. This is exactly what kept quartertone pianos from becoming popular--it makes quartertones sound bad; but on certain harpsichords and guitars and synthesizers, quartertones sound very well.

The new possibility I have now opened to you and you and you, in experimenting with combinations of new tuning-systems AND new timbres and control over timbre. Yes, I know. Most commercial synthesizers and computer=music software do afford a range of timbres and recently they may include Additive Synthesis and Sampling. But all that is still in 12-tone equal temperament so the full value of having all those timbres at hand is not yet realized, until you go for xenharmonics.

Reading about it is no substitute for hearing it, since you quite literally CANNOT IMAGINE. There is now enough opened-up unexplored territory to keep hundreds of composers and musicians busy for a long long time. Why settle for just one non-12 system when you will be able to have everything?

During 1988 I produced a number of publications and even more leaflets and flyers. Since there had been such a long delay in getting out Xenharmonic Bulletin Nos. 11 and 12, I decided early on to write and make available some of the items separately that will be part of those Bulletins. Similarly, some items from back issues will continue to be available separately for those who like the convenience of consulting a small pamphlet instead of a full issue.

Related to this is another contemporary consideration: A new field called Desktop Publishing and its computerized partner, Word Processing, is still in its infancy. Even if I could afford it, it would be unprofitable for me to jump into those fields right now to publish all my information. They are being perfected and improved constantly and will mature soon enough and they will be easier to use and get access to than they are now.

During 1987 and 1988 a number of people urged me to convert all back issues of Xenharmonic Bulletin and some other pamphlets into a Big Book. That might have been the right course in 1930 or so, but now with radically different commercial conditions in the publishing field it would not work for this kind of publication. Book publishers do not yet know what xenharmonics is and if they did know, might send the MS. back unopened. It would cost more to send it around the standard and small publishers than it would cost to self-publish it, and furthermore the delay might continue beyond my life-span. No matter how good the book was and how well printed, it cannot possibly take the place of sound recordings. As Desktop Publishing gets better and I gain more acquaintance and colleagues and interested parties, the idea of pamphlets and bulletins and fascicules and leaflets devoted to this or that portion of our field that someone or other needs new information on at a particular time becomes more and more sensible.

How many of you know how high the price of such a book would be? Just compare the prices of certain books on music and on electronics and audio and about using computers today. They are too expensive for the very people who would read them. It might be $50 or $60 a copy or more! I'd rather sell you tapes at a fraction of that price, and no doubt the other composers in the Xenharmonic Music Alliance would feel likewise. Progress in electronic music is so rapid now that the book would be obsolete the day it was all printed. That's why I concentrate on short pamphlets and medium-length bulletins.

Xenharmonics isn't like other musical affairs that remain the same. (Their books don't become obsolete: How to Play a Flute. History of the Violin, Drums around the World.) SOmebody will discover a new chord or new harmonic progression once a week in xenharmonics. Each issue of Interval Magazine had one or two things that could not have been predicted the year before. Surprises abound. Xenharmonics of the Nineties will be like the Revolts of the Sixties. A new slang lingo will spring up, mark my words. A book on the new scales would be laughably out of step by 1995. Shorter publications can be supplemented as new things happen. All that is very healthy: it will keep us from getting bored. SUrely, you won't love monotony. WHat I went through as a body learning music shouldn't have happened to a dog. No wonder the families and neighbors of music-students are exasperated -- we have already entered the Age of Robotics and why should we train to be robots also? Trade in your Monotony and we will give you Variety!

Xenharmonics even gives new angles on existing music. WItness the results achieved in the last several years by David Hill. We met him, Jonathan Glasier and I, while he was still living in the city of Orange in Orange County, southern California.

David Hill has experience in computer programming and learned about just intonation and so built a special instrument called the Quadvox, which was a four-voiced synthesizer with built-in microcomputer. It differed from other synthesizers by having just-intonation capabilities built into it from the ground up.

He carried on a number of comparisons of just intonation with the ordinary 12-tone system, but mainly was interested in producing just intonation renderings of early choral music, since presumably that music would be improved in smoothness and be more authentic if it were performed just, rather than in the 12-tone equal temperament almost universal on today's church organs.

He produced a 3-cassette set called Introduction to Non-Tradition Harmony, in which there is a most impressive 4-part setting harmonizing both the Harmonic Series, 1 through 16, and the Subharmonic Series, the same way. Then he has produced many demonstrations where those early chorales and more recent pieces are treated, not merely in the 5-limit just intonation (i.e., the major third and intervals derived from it being just) but also the 7-, 11- and 13-limits are explored--adding these higher harmonics and the intervals derived from them to the stock of pitches used for playing the early and later pieces.

This of course would be anathema to traditional harmony teachers and many professors of music, who object strenuously to any experiments with music and any use of intervals like 4:7 or 8:11, let along 8:13, especially when someone would dare to insert such intervals into older music. You should see the expressions of horror and lese-majeste and dismay when I tell "conservative" musicians about this.

The issue is progress vs. stagnation! Why has every other art except music made such progress during the 20th century and why has music been held back so much? Why are composers especially among musicians, so intimidated by others in the musical field? Why do performers prefer dead composers to the living, and those form certain (not all) parts of Europe to those born in the United States?

One of the proponents of non-12 tuning, Alexander J. Ellis, translator of the Helmholtz book Sensations of Tone, is still being attacked without any mercy by various authors of books on music, and they don't seem to have any shame doing this to him 99 years after his death. Much of this has to do with just intonation. So those like David Hill who do actual experiments with actual sounds of music know that they are walking into a hornet's nest. I still can't figure out after all these years how the musical establishment gains anything by stopping progress. I never got any explanation of these behavior that made any sense. It seems strange that I get treated fairly as a writer or making visual art, but not as a composer.

David HIll had a chance to move to FLorida, and then to program a Platypus computer at the University in Tallahassee, so that it can produce a new kind of music, mostly in just intonation extended to higher harmonics and thus to intervals that have not been used in music before outside of demonstration of the harmonic series. It cost him a great deal of time to go from his own apparatus to this more elaborate setting with much more computing power, and much more versatility.

So David Hill has surmounted some of the limitations that composers have had to struggle against for centuries--in this case, the fact that performers reading sheet music perform in real time, and a computer can be programmed to play music without the composer needing to practice finger exercises or manipulate a keyboard or other instrument in real time.

"Real TIme" is here a computerese expression meaning that a real-time performance takes place at the same speed as the playback of the recording, or it is done before a live audience and it is too late to correct any wrong notes because they have already been heard.

In this case, using so many new intervals that have never been tried before in an actual recording of 4-part harmony, complete with timbre changes and chorus effects and dynamic changes, and observing rhythm, real time is frankly impossible. Too many opportunities to play wrong notes, and often one would not know which pitch is the right one without first hearing both it and its neighbors, tried over and over till the difficult decision can be made. If you wonder why he doesn't have dozens of manufacturers of synthesizers knocking on his door to get the proverbial Better Mousetrap, well their customers demand real-time performance capability and in extended just intonation there are too many unequally-spaced pitches per octave to juggle fast enough. He is therefore in the position of the sculptor modelling a bust, having to see how the last little change looked before trying the next change, and having to be very very sure before the bust is cast in bronze or whatever material.

It's like the bump in the carpet in a fairly large living=room: you straighten out the bump here and another one pops up on the other side fo the sofa. Then you fix that one and sill another bump appears in the middle of the room as if by magic. My solution in this house is bare floors throughout.

I guess I better explain some more: David Hill took some quite old music written before the Classical symphonies and operas were developed in Central Europe. Being mainly choral, it was not composed with keyboards in mind. That made it suitable for trying out how it would work in just intonation, first with ordinary chords, then introducing new chords and intervals that might be logically implied by the harmonic structure. Some of these pieces have the old Church Modes coming down from Ancient Greeces, not the Major/Minor System of the 18th/19th centuries.

In effect, he was leapfrogging over the 18th and 19th centuries and the Standard Symphonic Repertoire and the vast Romantic Piano Literature performed in formal concert-halls. What would have happened if history had gone differently? How would music have evolved if the 12-tone-per-octave keyboard had not been invented and manufactured in such enormous quantities?

Now the following is my deduction, no necessarily his, since I haven't asked him yet, but I think that in order for the CLassical and Romantic music literature to be developed since 1700, many perfectly valid alternative musical innovations were suppressed.

No use asking who was to blame. More appropriately, say it was economic and other forces entirely beyond anyone's control. Trends in other arts and in the sciences. The 19th century Industrial Revolution--pianos were one of the first mass-produced items with a rigidly frozen design. The trend of musical-instrument making, out of cottage industries and small town little workshops, into huge impersonal factories managed by people who couldn't care less about new music or new composers. This reverberated down to our own time, and only recently has it become even respectable or tolerable to makes one's own musical instruments at home. The Do-It-Yourself Movement has had a terrible uphill battle--and this has been during the life-spans of most of you.

It hasn't taken all of my 71 years to reverse the trend, so that now it is tolerable for somebody to design and build their own musical instruments, but it sure has taken 50 years! That's one of the reasons for me writing you now. Those interested in a new and different music have to get together and so something about it and also learn what one another HAVE DONE ALREADY. If I don't tell what I have accomplished already, it will die with me.

I don't see what's noble or wonderful or beautiful or desirable about keeping my compositions to myself and allowing my instruments to be hauled to the County of City Dump or burnt up in somebody's bonfire, when with the aid of people already in touch with one another, and facilities like xeroxing, each of you can ensure the survival of what you and I have done; and by pooling our knowledge and skills, each of us has simply everything needed to progress. Nobody needs a Monopoly. Cut-throat competition and professional jealousy are not necessary when we all have the new musical resources and the new technology at hand.

Isn't being heard in each other's living room RIGHT NOW preferable to struggling for years to have some conductor or recitalist perform a score just once in some outrageously-expensive concert-hall? And a thousand to one it would never happen?

We better get nitty-gritty with dollar-signs right now: even 20 years ago, it would have cost me more to get one concert hall performance just once of a conservative standard orchestra composition or a string quartet or a cello-and-piano piece than all my furniture and equipment is worth. Just one performance. No second chance at all. Now take the point of view of today's listeners at home: why should they go out to some distant place in the evening after being tired out form the day's work, when with cassette-duplicating they can stay at home and hear it in their own apartment or rooms? Very often, my listeners play my cassettes in their cars while driving someplace they have to go to anyway, and sometimes they put the cassette in their Walkmans or the like.

Not too long ago a fellow called me up to say he was listening to one of my compositions in his office and this was in order to help him get ideas, and he had succeeded in doing just that a number of times.

One of the good recent trends is the increase in number of people who make their own music at home or in small groups, compared with the rather passive attitude of the 1940s and 1950s.

One of the reasons this report could not be done methodically in strict chronological order with formal outlines and such, is that it has to be about our Lateral Informal Network of people interested in new instruments and/or new scales, the Xenharmonic Music Alliance--and the cross-links between some of these people (connections which do not go through some leader or head office) have to related. Another reason is that the happenings in 1987 as well as 1988 went by so fast that sticking to too strict an order would make more confusion than it could cure.

I wish I could mention everybody who figured in the happenings of 1987 and 1988, but that might become a lengthy list. Anybody who wants to be mentioned in future publications can write or phone me about what they have done in new instruments, new scales, and kinds of music, or even things outside this field, since I have a number of pamphlets and publications in preparation--I will get to Xenharmonic Bulletin No. 11 before concluding. They don't have to wait for the 1989 or 1990 Annual Reports, if that's a worry.

We might mention Denny Genovese, now in Nokomis, Florida, and nearby communities, who used to live in California and before that in Hawaii. His approach to the Harmonic Series is quite different from that of David Hill already described, bu it's the same Harmonic Series. For one thing, he has made special fipple-flutes which have no keys or finger-holes bu one can vary wind-pressure to sound a series of natural harmonics of whatever the length of the tube happens to be. He has a booklet explaining how to use the Fipple Pipes.

Warren Burt in Australia recently sent me cassettes and then a xerox of an article describing apparatus to be built for converting the natural movements of dancers into musical sounds. Also about his tapes, which were based on the 12-0, 19- and 31-tone scales. I had met him on his trip to California almost three years ago.

Gary Morrison in Dallas Texas obtained some instruments and investigated various scales and sent sample tapes of his experiments a while ago. This is more from the computer-programming angle and also by using Samplers, which we referred to back on earlier pages.

John H. Chalmers, J. in Berkeley, California has been active in music theory for almost 30 years, getting into it from the mathematical and theoretical fields, and, as already mentioned, compiling tables for various tuning-systems and more recently preparing tapes illustrating these theoretical considerations. For a while he corresponded with and visited the studio of Lou Harrison, the composer in Aptos, California who was active in just intonation for some years and a tireless promoter of new forms of the Gamelan as well as the traditional form. Last year John Chalmers was involved with a Bay Area Gamelan Group, and some experts on this subject. He has kept me abreast of various developments in experimental music and also sent me many xeroxes of pertinent literature and newspaper accounts of performances.

Doug Keislar at Stanford University in Northern California has originated designs for new keyboards. Also he has programmed computers to explore new scales and produced a tape which takes a couple of Bach organ pieces and runs the same short piece through scale after scale--now a wonderful one, much better than usual; then another which is either ugg, or kind of OUCH!

In my recent tape, TEEN TUNES, I go through some of the scales he went through, but I improvise. Thus I suit the balance between those utter opposites, melody and harmony, to the scale in question. Keislar took the scales 7 through 12 and subjected Bach's 200-year-old choral composition to each of those scales in turn--not writing them out--that would have prevented this being done and it sure needed to be done in sound because everybody else has avoided it!--but the fact that the 11- and 13-tone scales were not even dreamt of by Bach's contemporaries and there was no information about them available, means they got a bad knockdown on Keislar's new tape.

In TEEN TUNES, I turned on the Korg Poly-Six that was modified and first set it to the 13-tone equal temperament, and turned on the tape machine and went right ahead. I did not write one note down! Having heard the 13-tone scale, I knew its properties--non-harmonic, but melodically strange and different. So no attempt at regular harmony--it would be useless. But unlike some others who have tried 13, I didn't bad-mouth it nor throw it out of court on its You-Know-What. The solution was to put rhythm in it and concentrate on melody and ignore the dissonances. Then on to 13-15-, 16, 17, 18, and 19, each with its biases and moods and personalities. Contrast was the Name of the Game. Don't try to force 13 to be 12! Don't try to force 17 or 18 to be 19! Why have them if you don't want each to be itself? One composer who shall be nameless here, since he got enough publicity elsewhere, produced a recording with all the scales 13 through 24, but tried to LEVEL them out--to reduce the contrasts and kept appealing again and against the precepts in traditional harmony textbooks and apparently to other precepts in standard textbooks on arranging and orchestration.

This just was overkill! It is NOT that hard to compose in new scales. If it were, I wouldn't have had time to, and would have had a pile or miserable failures instead of grinding out dozens of copies of my cassettes. There would be no Xenharmonic Music Alliance if it were that difficult. It would be useless to do this Report, since I would be talking to myself for 50-odd pages. Instead, I get new visitors and phone-callers. I produced the entire TEEN TUNES tape in four hours! No muss no fuss no bother no hassle at all. Just turn on the equipment and play it. Check the playback every 10 minutes to be sure it was recorded, then resume. Then put it in the duplicator that Jonathan Glasier found for me and grind them out!

After I got orders for copies, and I still do, I went on: more tapes in 19, in 31, in 22, a demo of the scales 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25; another demo having 26, 27, 34, 40, and some others. New copies of the Just Intonation overdub with four instruments of the Megalyra Group whenever I have time to make more copies.

If I can do it you can do it also. There is plenty of room for everyone who wishes to enter the field. No need to do the old thing too many others have done, and feel the terrible crowding and competition.

TO help newcomers to xenharmonics get started, I have prepared a number of pamphlets and leaflets, which I keep reprinting as copies are needed. One leaflet, entitled XENHARMONICS FOR YOU, deals with which scale you should start with. It depends on your musical experience: Do you come from the vocal side? From piano study? From the guitar? From electronic instruments? From outside music, getting into building instruments, then wanting to play them?

DON'T FENCE ME IN! is a more recent pamphlet dealing with the xenharmonistic, out-of-joint, lamentable, distressing, unbearable, outrageous present situation of new musical instruments using the very latest electronic technology, but being so built as to lock-in the 19th-century musical possibilities and in some cases even those of the 18th, 17th, and 16th centuries! That is, a composer or someone wishing to experiment with new harmony or melody cannot do so on these instruments, despite their recent manufacture and high cost and up-to-date internal features. Computer software for music now just put on the market is just as bad, even worse in some cases, as I know for sure, having witnessed demonstrations of it and even having been able to play certain of the instruments and in one case while they were connected to computers and peripherals of recent date.

The most shameful aspect of this has been the selling of software as well as instruments which will only give you 12 pitches at a time out of a new scale and even NEGLECT TO INFORM YOU THAT THIS OR THAT SCALE IS CRIPPLED AND TRUNCATED AND INCOMPLETE! My friends shared by distress about this to the point they got extra copies of Don't Fence Me In printed. SO this is not my private selfish concern--I have instruments now which do not have these limitations--BUT the public is being misled and short-changed, and that is very serious.

The pamphlet is available from me and others and will continue to be.

DEFINING ONE'S TERMS is a booklet which may--no, will--be revised as the need is felt. If I create any neologisms, or use words in new senses, or adopt buzzwords that haven't yet gone public, it is my duty to define my terms--otherwise it is my own fault if I am misunderstood. SOme writers on xenharmonics have coined so many new terms that misunderstanding already has done great damage to the movement. I have room here only to quote one example: Tone. Look up "tone" in any dictionary in English, Russian, French, German, or Spanish, and it has too darn many meanings! That which means everything means nothing.

TWELVE PITCHES ARE NO LONGER ENOUGH is a short affair for people who are too busy to read all of "Don't Fence Me In" and for some who would never have time to read this Report. Short enough to mail out to others without costing an arm and a leg. Postage has just about put me out of business and threatens to shut us all down. Much of the hardship and delay in getting together with others in music has been outrageous postage and communications costs. I cannot believe that a rise in the cost of a one-ounce letter from 3cents to 25 cents is justified. The rise in postcards from 1 cent to 15 cents is cuckoo! For shame!

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF? is a short pamphlet dealing with the Meantone Temperament and those equal temperaments which are very close to it. Backward-looking musicians and theorists refuse to recognize the existence of 31-tone equal temperament and the fact which can be proved by listening that there is no audible difference between an actual performance of an actual piece of music in a concert-hall or on any commercial or private recording, in the standard traditional 1/4-comma Meantone temperament and the 31-tone equal temperament. There is a difference of about 6 cents (1/200 of an octave, 1/16 of a semitone about) between the point at which a circle of 31 Meantone Fifths fails to close, and the return to the starting-pitch of a circle of 31 31-tone-tempered Fifths. This can be shown in a laboratory or in the same room as a special instrument. But does it matter in the actual playing of any practical piece of music that somebody would want to listen to?

Because so-called Conservative Musicians and Traditionalists and Antiquarians and Musician Historians refuse to dialogue with people who build and play instruments today and those who invent instruments and write software for computers to do music, the most dreadful falsehoods and misleading misinformation continues to get tremendous publicity and people are turned away from a wonderful opportunity to hear a very fine useful musical tuning-system that works for greater and smoother Harmony.

Because of the proliferation of new instruments and equipment which will not give you more than 12 pitches per octave at a time, and because of the above refusal of traditionally-oriented musicians to talk to musical innovators like you or me, the Big Lie, the outrageous Falsehood, the Dreadful Misinformation, the Deception, the Tragedy of Arrested Progress in Music, continues.

The original quarter-comma meantone temperament demands MORE than TWELVE PITCHES PER OCTAVE available ALL THE TIME, in order to work. It demands that both C-sharp and D-flat of its system, both G-sharp and A-flat, both B-sharp and C_natural, be available all the time on instruments. The so-called WOlf is a compulsory mistake, an error, a dissonance, an avoidable discord, caused by restricting the number of pitches available on keyboard instruments. So I protest to the end of my life when a set of only 12 pitches per octave is offered as complete authentic 1/4-comma standard meantone.

I do understand it is impractical in many cases to provide all 31 notes of the 31-tone equal temperament, or 31 notes of standard meantone which would leave a tine Wolf Cub of 6 cents between A-quadruple-sharp and C, but how many time do you play A-quadruple-sharp? I never heard of it till I made charts and did calculations back in dear old 1972. If these synthesizer people would agree to provide 18 pitches or standard meantone, or 24, i.e., two regular sets of 12, I would accept the compromise for performing virtually all existing music that could benefit by being done in meantone.

Surely computer-software people ought to be willing to do this. In this case I speak from bitter experience. For 49 years I have tuned pianos and organs and harpsichords and what-all. Twice I was asked to put meantone on a piano and I complied. Result, the dreadful Wolf. G-sharp against E-flat or C-sharp against A-flat--what should be a fifth is a terrible discord. Well what happened? Somebody visited their studio or classroom and played wolf after wolf. My reputation as tuner went down the drain! No amount of explanation by the customer would set it right--I was accused of incompetence.

During the last decade, during which, by the way, interest in meantone by both backward- and forward-looking music experts has greatly increased, I have simply refused to put a piano into 12 pitches of Meantone or 12-out-of-31, which is the same thing for any conceivable real music that would be played in meantone for any conceivable real music that would be played in meantone. The two times I complied with customers' requests cost me a lot of other tuning I could have had, but these people who played the wolves spread misinformation. So I was out some beautiful green money. In the meantime I fretted several guitars to 31-tone and thus can play meantone on an electric guitar, a nylon-string classical guitar, or a steel-string acoustic guitar. I have recorded all three, and fretted other 31-tone guitars for other persons. Thanks are due ERvin M. Wilson of Los Angeles for getting me started refretting and lending me his 31-tone guitar for about a year.

Fall 1988, I received that already-mentioned Korg Poly-Six system which can have all notes of 31 (or even 31 or 53) on it all the time. Then the two Farfisa Organs can be put into 24 notes of meantone in about 45 minutes any time this is needed and I have tapes of that also.

Oops! Not you won't have to order the Big Bad Wolf pamphlet--but there are still dozens of people who will never have time to read this Report, so it must be keep available for them to read.

Admittedly: Much music is not suitable for playing in meantone. Meantone and 31-Equal lack a certain Zonk and aggressive PUnch that 12, 17, 19 and some other systems do have. But a tremendous amount of existing music and music yet to be composed would sound far far better in 31. "Soothing the Savage Beast" or calming people down, or when you want to rest and take it easy. Most people who hear the 31-tone guitars just love them. There is a whole 31-tone group of composers in the Netherlands.

Glen Prior previously mentioned got together with me and started Xenharmonic Music Alliance programs and meetings in order to get people to hear and perform in 31.

While I was writing the first pages of this Report, Jonathan Glasier went up to Northern California on Business and picked up three 19-tone instruments from James Piehl now in Northern California but formerly in the Denver Colorado area. These instruments will be reconditioned and form part of the Interval Foundation and studio facilities. Mr. Piehl was getting older and did not want them lost, so through some persons in our Alliance, they are now saved and will be used.

ANother publication of mine getting slowly sent out during 1988 is 50th Anniversary of the Electornic Keyboard Oboe, celebrating the fact that that instrument, now 53 years old, was played in orchestras 51 years ago, and still works as good as new after all that time. Its how and why and wherefore and values are described in considerable detail in that booklet. There is also a half-hour one-side-of-a-cassette devoted to it and its overdubs with other instruments. Flip side of that cassette is the 4-part overdub of the Meglayra Group already written about here.

ELASTIC TUNING is a pamphlet written at the request of John McBryde, who had heard my new copy from a reel-to-reel tape done in 1963 on the special organ I had built in 1962--an organ damaged in 1976 and lost in 1985 when having to move to San Diego. Unlike all the other new scales mentioned in this Report, Elastic Tuning is a discovery of how, electronically, to effect the correction or partial correction, DYNAMICALLY, not jumping to the corrected or nearly-corrected pitches, but MOVING to them over a noticeable fraction of a second. The instrument with Elastic Tuning does what the players in a live ensemble or choir do when they are not on pitch at the start of a tone in a chord. If they are forced or trained to 12-tone equal temperament, nevertheless they tend to move to Just Intonation. They may not have time during the sounding of the notes to get there, but they try to. No matter what temperament the special organ of mine was tuned to, it tried to go just. Like the people in the ensembles and choruses, the individual notes on my organ TRIED TO GO JUST WHILE THE CHORD WAS SOUNDING! Not one note or pitch-generator forcing any of them, but ARRIVING AT A CONSENSUS BY MUTUAL STRIVING.

Can this be done on a new instrument? Can it be done by a computer? That is what some of you will have to find out.

Constantly up-dated LISTS of compositions and publications within music and outside it will be available.

I held CREATIVITY MEETINGS years ago and a new booklet is now available. Further, TAPES of actual meetings are on sale. I am available to give new meetings or lectures or creativity.

Please make it known to your friends and acquaintances that I need agents and promoters for many projects that must not die with me. At my age I can't do everything, so must turn things over to others.

Referral of the old phone number in Glendale was soon stopped in Fall 1985; the recent move, two years ago within San Diego, resulted in lots of mail being sent back as though I were no more. URGENT: Notify anybody you know that my resent address and phone number are:

3612 Polk Avenue, San Diego CA 92104; (619) 284-7075

ALL TEN back issues of XENHARMONIC BULLETIN are still available and will be. Issue 11 is in preparation.

IVOR DARREG HAS FRETTING TABLES, FREQUENCY TABLES, AND BEAT TABLES for new instrument construction or modification. Instrument Builders and Customizers may obtain or exchange information on these, and/or the license to copy Ivor Darreg's instruments.