Product Engineering magazine [Elmer Tangerman was the editor at the time] for November, 1965 gave this the whole Editorial page! That resulted in a sellout of the mimeographed pages early 1966 and thus as the demand continued, the 1967 revision was run. This was not an easy thing at all!

The booklet's 35 original pages had been typed on mimeograph stencils directly? with a Varityper a very cantankerous machine. This meant that corrections were very difficult. The 4 additional pages in 1967, bringing the total to 39, were done likewise1 and cleaning the 35 original mimeo stencils to run them again was a nightmare that "shouldn't have happened to a dog."

Reprinting continued till the stencils were useless, and remember this was before there were photocopy xeroxing stores on every other streetcorner.

For several years it just was not practical to run any more copies till the price of xerography came down, so it wasn't a case of lack of demand.

The booklet paid all expenses,which is not usual for mimeographed self-published affairs. 25 years later~ it is not necessary to back down on it nor to retract statements.

Note, please, that Product Engineering is not a music magazine. No music magazine would have printed any part of the booklet, nor would review it either. But many publications of the 1960's and 1970's outside the musical establishment were hospitable enough.

Furthermore, it helped start our musical lateral network now called the Xenharmonic Music Alliance -- an informal affair with no officers or dues or meetings or rising expenses. (Other information on this by request.)

Had "Shall We Improve the Piano?" been submitted to publishers or literary agents through the conventional channels, it would have never seen print. This would still be the case. The piano is an idol of a strange religion; it is a Sacred Cow; it is a Nostalgia Artifact; and its Image today is still alive as the instrument itself painfully slowly retreats before the electronic keyboards and changing economic and social conditions.

Time to do something about the booklet: reissue it without change? Update it? Various people arguing on both sides. But there are new possibilities that didn't exist in 1965 or 1967. One is go audio convert it into one of those Cassette Course Packages -- say three cassettes and add lots of piano tones and some other keyboard instruments. The booklet would then be rather small and part of a package. Another possibility would be a videotape. These two ideas do not exclude each other. We might do both.

Why Ivor Darreg's booklet rather than somebody else's? What's so special about it? In the first place~ Ivor Darreg's acquaintance with pianos began about 1924. He was 7; he is now 73. Secondly, Ivor Darreg has been a composer for nearly 60 years. Sure -- jillions of pianists out there -- "a dime a dozen" and nothing too rare about being a performer on the instrument. But composers were supposed to be dead. (How dare anyone alive profane the Piano Religion?)

Thirdly, when somebody in the piano industry needs information, they may turn to performing pianists, but never to any composer. They want the best reproduction of the pianos and circumstances of 150 years ago when the Romantic Period in Europe was flourishing. They care nothing about the needs of composers living today.

"Hang the expense!" seems to be their motto. Piano prices have gone through the roof. For what today's pianos cost, you can get a synthesizer that does everything but vacuum the floors and take out the garbage.

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Under today's economic conditions and cramped housing and all, it just isn't realistic to jam a piano into the average apartment. And then to expect students to practice ONLY what is needed to perform music 250 to 150 years old and to ignore what can be composed today. All that stuff is on records and cassettes and now CDs, and soon on DAT or something similar. How can the average person compete with these heavily edited and doctored performances? And why should they, in the first place?

The recording studib can actually take out all the wrong notes and if need be replace them with right ones. This has created a situation where people are disappointed with live concerts because they don't sound as good as the records! Moreover. pianos are now expensive. So guess what happens about their tuning and maintenance. They get neglected. Who can afford what a repairperson or piano tuner or for that matter, piano MOVER, costs today? The Image of 1870's glories is still alive and well, but the real pianos in real places today are out-of-tune AND out-of-whack.

1990 is the 5Oth anniversary of Ivor Darreg taking up piano-tuning, so the information in the booklet is first-hand, not copied from somebody else's book and that book copied from somebody farther back in time. My predictions in 1965 and 1967 that may have seemed unreasonable and egregious, have come true with a vengeance. The tuning business has shrunk lately, since the electronic keyboards in general use have been fixed-tuned at the factory. This has created the notion that pianos do not need tuning or action-adjustment anymore than the foolproof keyboards now on the market.

The difference with this piano booklet has to do with Specialization in the past Composers were not supposed to perform what they composed, and didn't have the chance to bypass the concert-hall by recording their own stuff as this can be done today let alone being able to edit such recordings or enhance them with new audio equipment. Composers were not able to buitd their own new instruments -- and on the other side of the fence, artisans and manufacturers and instrument-designers were hardly ever composers. Inventors were spurned by manufacturers who hated to re-tool for any innovations. You would hardly believe how many improvements in the piano have been proposed in the last century. But it is somewhat more than 100 years since the evolution of the piano stopped stone dead! Nowhere possible to go beyond a certain point.

The last sixty years -- 1930-1990 -- Ivor Darreg has been asked more questions than any patent attorney or music-teacher or librarian. As recently as 1985 or 1989 these questions still keep coming, because the above specialization or Division of Labor notion of the 19th century has suppressed Information that everybody should have had. Hence the extreme appropriateness of the 1965 title, "Shall We Improve the Piano?" Diamonds may be forever, but not pianos. The composers want new resources so music can get out of stasis and forge ahead. But 17th century technology will not and cannot do it.

Wooden machinery! And today even, weighted keyboards coming out for controlling the electronic instruments, to make them "feel like" pianos! Somebody is crazy.

An alert friend of ours saw the editorial in a new magazine about such imitation piano-feel keyboards and sent it here. So this is not just a private gripe. It's a symptom of general malaise. That is why new publication of Darreg's piano booklet in some form or other with new information and examples in actual sound is needed.

You need the benefit of co-ordinated information that has hitherto been compartmentalized into pronouncements by specialists who may be crackerjack experts in one narrow field but have not had the same access to other parts of the total musical picture. Someone has to be composer and instrument designer and instrument builder and performer on old and new instruments and know orchestras from the inside and know electronics and amplifying equipment from the inside and have some idea of where music can go from here, and also someone who has searched the Prior Art, as the Patent Office calls it.

tremendous advantage you all can have, that was impossible in 1965 and unthinkable in 1940 or 1930, is today's growth of Networking. New means of communication. Not just the printed word, but audio and video and the benefits brought by the computer. This is underscored by the fact that many of today's keyboard instruments actually are dedicated computers.

They have ROM and RAM and disks and other computer-insides. Often they are connected to other instruments and other apparatus through MIDI--musical instrument digital interface. Very likely other interfaces will emerge before long.

Then there is Sampling: using sounds recorded from older instruments and most Samplers have piano sounds. You can now play the shadow and the ghost and the simulacrum and the echo of a piano. This is at once a solution and a problem. It gets pianos (several different pianos at a time by the wah) into a PORTABLE keyboard and a removable disk, and thus into the smallest quarters. But at the very same time it ties one's thinking and possibilities back to the 19th and 18th centuries. It's a new way to play back recordings, and you don't have sufficient control over the sounds, which someone else you will never see has performed.

After 60 years of playing real pianos it is a devastating experience to play those samples for the first time. Not Canned Music but Freeze-Dried Music! Dehydrated indeed. You have to reconstitute it before use.

A boon, of course, to the touring keyboard performer who just doesn't have time onstage and under tight schedule to created some new timbres. That is very understandable. But the composer who wants to forge ahead to the future, not merely mirror the past?

One thing the Sampler can do to piano tones is change their pitches and even put them in other scales to which no real piano could be tuned without breaking strings and other troubles.

The piano mechanism has prevented leaving the 12-tone tuning. The design has no flexibility. The sampler's echo of a piano sound is alterable to some extent. Retuning is one of those alterabilities. Sympathetic vibration of strings not struck by using the damper (loud) pedal is not.

Let's put this another way: The composer has been at the mercy of the pianist, who in turn has been at the mercy of the piano-tuner -- who in turn has been at the mercy of the manufacturer in some soul-less corporation far from here. It's time to start anew from scratch!

Let's do it right with what is now at hand. We can leave this oldfashioned affair In place--Instead of trying to modify it, start anew from the viewpoint of the Generalist, not the team and time-displaced corps of Specialists.

Some forward-looking composers have been thinking in terms of battling the Musical Establishment, of going in for noise for its own sake -- demolishing the traditional harmony completely and replacing it with Total Serialism--otherwise stated, Music In Cold Blood. No need to list the names here--they are so well known that that would be Overkill!

But why feel we must destroy the old before creating the new? Leave the traditionalists in their 19th-century mortuary memorial chapel, and ignore them as they ignore us. Our energy is needed to Implement new music, not just talk about it. That was one of the motivations for the writing of that Piano Booklet back in 1965. Summarize the situation as of that time, bring together much of the information that had been kept apart and not allowed to interact before.

Especially the wasteful results of this lack of communication among instrument designers, inventors' manufacturers, performers, composers, piano technicians, tuners, music teachers, music theorists and authors of music textbooks. To say nothing of physicists and acousticians.

Result: acoustics books discuss the piano as though it were the only possible instrument to use and as though no new kind of music were possible other than what it permits to be sounded. Performers cannot get sheet music of new composers and publishers refuse to print it. A certain national magazine devoted to science and engineering progress will not discuss instruments beyond the piano nor how to go for new kinds of music that cannot be played at all on conventional instruments. Tons of money go into concert-halls and promotion of concerts there of dead composers' music, while today's composers are starved out.

Big charitable high-pressure fund-drives are needed to keep the symphony orchestras going, while nothing is available to get new music heard. So the only way it can get heard is through clandestine underground networks of people, made possible only since the wide availability of cassettes and machines to record and copy and play them.

The musicians who need to hear what is now possible are kept from knowing about it even existing. They may learn about so-called avant-garde music for conventional instruments, usually tied tightly to atonal serialism composed at a piano, and if performed at all, performed at universities insulated from the general public.

More often, serial music is judged in WRITTEN form as how neat and tidy it looks on paper. Never mind how it sounds. The composers are trying to get degrees from the colleges. Never mind whether this premeditated frigid music can be played well or not.

How many composers or musicians have ever searched the music-instrument patents? Ivor Darreg was told that inventors must make such searches--that was back in 1936. In 1939 and again during the fdrties and early fifties, the search was up-dated. Alas! Bad news! Inventors conceived the wrong instruments and most of them quite ignorant of any living composers or what they might desire.

Some of the wrong instruments were financially successful and hit the market. Surely you know which ones without our having to flog dead horses and belabor the point.

Today we see the depressing spectacle of the latest technology being used to re-create the player-piano of 1910. Computer parts controlled by a digital-pulse tape recording (control signals~ not digital sound) cause solenoids or other electro-mechanical devices to whack piano-keys. Scott Joplin or Debussy or perhaps Liszt. Hardly progress. Dressed up to appeal to nostalgic Yuppies.

Something like the busses here in San Diego plying certain downtown streets and over to the park , fixed up to look like San Francisco cable cars. If you've ever lived in San Francisco and ridden up and downhill on REAL cable-cars, this Nostalgia Affair doesn't hack it. Like the Sampled Piano Tones mentioned above.

Two years ago, Jonathan Glasier of San Diego, Director of the Interval Foundation, which deals with new music and new tunings and Publishes Interval Magazine since 1978, got the idea of Producing an Ivor Darreg Piano Retrospective at a local recording Studio on a regular grand Piano. Copies of this cassette were sent out at that time and since. Two or three pieces from this recording could well be incorporated in a new version of "Shall We Improve the Piano?" as audio or videotape, either or both.

Around 1950, Ivor Darreg, realizing what was going to happen, gradually de-emphasized regular Piano~playing and composing in that Style, and prepared for the new instruments and their logical consequences. More than enough backlog of conventional piano compositions in conventional notation had been produced by that time.

That extensive body of music can now be selected from to exemplify the state of affairs before the changes of the 1960 5 and illustrate many points in the new version of the Piano Booklet.

Other of this music, by the way, is now being done by synthesizer and other more modern means and will be available in new incarnations starting now. Existing sheet music of many of these compositions will be kept available as xeroxes to order.

In a way, the Coming of Cassettes serves as a useful milestone of musical Progre55, in that music can now be.easily copied and distributed without need for in distant localities.

This is one of the main factors stymieing musical progress. Now the brakes are off. This is especially true in the field of new scales. How could quartertones get anywhere, so long as most composers in quartertones had to put up with TWO pianos tuned a quartertone apart? That explains the burst of quartertone activity around 1920 and why it fizzled.

Today, much easier with electronic instruments. No need to select one of the dozen rival quarter-tone notations and anger the lovers of all the other competing quartertone writing schemes. No, just play it and record it and that's that.

If you are not a composer, it will be difficult for you to empathize and appreciate what it was like to know about quartertones 60 years ago--in 1930 to read about it now and then in some magazine, but be unable to do anything about it, and decades went by almost up to 1990 before having enough instruments and equipment to compose seriously in not only quartertones, but such scales as just intonation, 19, 17, and 22 tones per octave, and the calming 31-tone system. It was a terribly long wait but it's over.

The recent coming of expanded possibilities in composition makes this the best possible time to re-issue SHALL WE IMPROVE THE PIANO? in contemporary form to sum up what has gone before but also allow you to hear piano and other keyboard tones and explain audibly what and how and why all this worked.

Other recordings, such as the recent 9-tone through 31-tone recording with timbres and computer enhancements by Brian McLaren, will, as a separate enterprise, show the vast territory outside the Pianofortic empire that we can now enter.

There are quite a number of possible ways to implement the re-issue of S.W.I.P. Your suggestions are very welcome at this time.