Wednesday, 23 March 1960. Second Edition October 1991.

Ivor Darreg

Let us consider something the average musician hardly ever is told about: the amount of information stored in a piano-action. The "voicing" and "regulating" are built-in properties or characteristics of the signals produced by means of the keyboard, and out of control by the performer. The same can be said of the way the piano is tuned at the moment, but tuning is done much more often than calling in a piano technician to adjust the action, so the average person will be more aware of tuning and out-of-tune conditions.

The piano-makers have already stored still more information in the instruments they have built, and some of this is even beyond the powers of tuner or technician to alter. Piano design is extremely rigid, and reflects the notions and ideas of manufacturers in the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in Europe. 1991 is so utterly different from 1850 or 1870 and conditions have changed so much that we might as well borrow that buzzword "cultural dissonance" here.

The pianist is utterly at the mercy of the last century's dead past and of many persons he or she will never see or know anything about. The quality of any note played on a given piano is mostly predetermined so that the performer can only release the stored information that he did not put in and is not really responsible for.

Now let us consider the relation of this continual repetition of old, stored information--the many many times a certain sound will be heard whenever certain keys are struck--as compared with what it would be like if the performer had control over the parameters of each note as it was performed. Say, as compared with the singer who indeed enjoys such control.

How much blame or praise does the listener give the pianist for those factors (the aforementioned items of information) in those piano sounds, for which the performer was not really responsible?

In the case of a pipe organ, each stop is pre-voiced at the factory, and similar corisiderations apply. Here the organist can make some higher-order combinations (choice of stops to be combined), just as the advertising typographer can make new combinations out of the alphabet-styles that the type-designers have given him.

Again, take the acoustics of the room in which the music is performed. We, as listeners, may find ourselves in the awkward position of commending or blaming the composer and/or the performer for qualities of sound that were built into the room by the Architect and the Construction Company!

Now--between March 1960 and October 1991--something marvelous has happened: we now have synthesizers and samplers and other affairs which finally give control over timbre and attack and voicing to the keyboard performer to a truly unheard-of extent. So suddenly has this come about that many musicians are afraid to accept their new-found powers.