For some two centuries a famous composition by the noted A. N. Onymous has resounded in concert-halls and palaces and schoolrooms and homes everywhere.

Generally, the special pianists who perform this piece loud and clear, play it to empty halls, even when someone pays for it to be performed, they don't stay around to appreciate it! Today as the new keyboards take over fewer and fewer chances for the average person to hear it,.

Sometime ago, Ivor Darreg realized that this affair was receding into History much faster than anyone was willing to admit or believe -- the day would come when it would be difficult for most people to find out how it sounded in the Old Days.

Already, the traditional way of tuning pianos by ear is dying out while electronic gadgetry replaces it. Back in 1940, by ear throughout was the ONLY way to do it.

Fortunately, another electronic apparatus came to the rescue: Why not record some piano tunings on tape to preserve the Way That Was? Sure; this must have occurred to some people, but Ivor Darreg had the advantage of primarily being a composer. This didn't have to be boring dull preservation for Posterity. Once the sounds of tuning had been captured and brought outside the cases of the pianos instead of remaining forever locked in there, amazing things could be done with them --Unheard-of, in fact!

They could be transposed to many different pitches, and this note and that remolded into new compositions th at could not have been played on any piano. They could be run backwards so that you can hear hammers un-striking strings that were being detuned. Old rumbling uprights can be pitted against clear new grands.

A while later, we got still more ideas. You can hear this now. Cassettes are available.

Piano Tuna Fish Scale

Back in 1968, when musique concrete was all the rage and being discussed in articles and elsewhere, I got an idea: Why not record some of the times when I would be tuning somebody's piano, then after there were enough plans amde and tapes collected, and after I heard enough recordings of others' tape-manipulations, assemble some piano-tuning sounds and related affairs into a composition?

Even before 1968 I knew that piano-tuning was a dying enterprise--I suspected that in the Fifties. However much music-teachers and our culture would deny that. slowly but inevitably the electronic keyboards would take over. Even those who had and kept pianos would sooner or later come to regard the piano as primarily furniture. The appearance of a grand in some well-appointed home or important studio would be what matters, rather than how it sounded. The actual deterioration and neglect of real pianos would seem of less and less importance when better and better electronic instruments hit the market.

Oh, sure: I was laughed at and castigated and scolded for such heretical ideas, but the signs of the Decline and Fall of the Pianofortic Empire were already there for anyone who really looked. Living accommodations getting smaller and snaller; people having to move, whatever.

Back in 1965, I produced a booklet called Shall We Improve the piano? which sold out in a hurry: I had to re-run more copies till the mimeo stencils were torn to shreds. Host of my predictions in there came true--indeed, the 1990's have carried things way beyond my expectations in 1965.

It was hardly an expert Sherlock Holmes Deduction even back in the fifties or sixties, to anticipate the coming of the day when there would be hardly any piano-tuners around) that few people would enter the trade, and that the lore and atmosphere and ambiance of piano-tuning itself would be lost before anyone got around to trying to preserve it. It's really too late now. For instance, new electronic devices used by many tuners short-circuit the lengthy temperament-procedure of getting the 12-tone Circle of Fifths to close properly and even up the sounds of the various keys-I.e., F major shouldn't sound all that different from the remote F# major.

The old-fashioned way of tuning pianos requires extreme patience. Who can be patient anymore? Our hurry-up lifestyles with scatterbrain shortened attention span where the TV or radio leaps from one subject to another before you have the slightest time to think. It even interrupts its own interruptions!

By 1972 I had collected three tape recorders (the old reel-to-reel type, of course) so I was ready to begin. With those recorders I had overdubbed various combinations of instruments and there was this new power to put compositions together without having to get someone else to perform them, therefore not having to write pages and pages of notes which might or might not get played properly. (Usually never played at all, sitting around in dark drawers or boxes in dead silence.)

Any discussion of modern music must mention John Cage--some kind of unwritten law, so. to comply with that regulation we will allude to the "prepared piano" with various things jammed between its strings. With the tape recorders there now was something better: remove the sounds from the innards of the piano and handle them in the recording equipment! Jump them up an octave, take them down an octave, insert vibrato, run then backwards, in order to hear hammers UN-striking the strings which strings are being detuned! Contrast the timbres of dull old clunkers with bright new grands. Contrast the tinbres of cramped spinets with full-throated Parlor Grands. In the case of this composition we are not talking of sampling some regular pianist's performance; we are talking of deliberately recording several pianos while they are being tuned in different kinds of environments and also allowing some of the incidental sounds of tuning to be heard.

Making those tapes into a piece of music requires selecting notes from this and that tape to form chords, and of course observing some principles of musical form such as stating a theme and returning it later, varying the dynamics, and using certain sounds which occur. when tuning a piano that cannot ordinarily be played with the keyboard.

One of these days these tapes can be pulled out of the mothballs and an entirely new composition. can be concocted with the effect-boxes and other apparatus available in today's studios. However, we did this on the original composition: we ran a major sixth from a grand piano through a fuzzbox and got a Duet for Two Planing-Mills.

True, some dry-as-dust acoustics expert or some retired professor could produce a didactic tape explaining how and why pianos were tuned in the old days and and endless historical asides about the 19th century and how this or that famous long-dead composer did thus and so; but that wouldn't give you the feel that "Piano Tuna Fish Scale" does -- all the possibilities locked inside pianos but never allowed to be heard; the sounds for which there is no notation since pianists are never allowed to produce them.

Soon those and other effects will be stilled forever, since nobody thought of capturing them in their heyday when there were piano-tuners and rebuilders and people who had devoted long lives to the craft. Today's Samplers do not have that atmosphere and milieu. The neglect of the opportunity to preserve the atmosphere. of course, is also somewhat the trade's fault -- they thought pianos and therefore tuners were forever, so did not like even to think about a day when they would be kind of passe'.

Today's keyboards, of course, are pretuned at the factory by installing a kind of computer chip which counts vibrations and thus establishes the tuning permanently. Only a few intrepid inventors and investigators think of defeating this factory-installed device and causing the synthesizer to play in unheard-of new scales. It can only be done on certain makes and models.

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