[Note: In all other cases Ivor's writings haven't any forewords. The vintage of Ivor's articles generally explains itself. Dates speak for themselves--no need to wonder why Ivor didn't mention digital synthesis in 1945.
But this article seems perverse unless we get a feel for the era in which it was written.
The original draft of Shall We Improve the Piano? dates from 1965. This final draft hails from 1967--though originally marked `Preliminary,' Ivor never updated the article...by the 70s Ivor realized that the entire premise had become obsolete.
Let's travel back 30 years...
In 1965 neither analog nor digital synthesis existed. The term `synthesizer' appeared only in obscure corners of radio engineering. (`Frequency synthesizers' generated RF test signals.) Digital samplers? The phrase wouldn't even have made sense--electronic engineers would have stared at you and asked `samples of digital what?'
The RCA Mark I Synthesizer underwent several incarnations twixt 1953 and 1958. It was not what we would today consider a synthesizer. Its oscillators? Mechanically-vibrated tuning forks! Its tone controls? Fixed formant filter-banks! Only the RCA Mark I's amplitude-envelope controls approach what today would be regarded as standard for a "synthesizer."
In 1965 Robert Moog's analog synthesizer languished on the shelf...a mere unfinished experimental breadboard. `Electronic music' still meant tube circuits, analog tape and creatively misused scientific test equipment. Serious hi-fi gear shunned transistors: 30 years ago most transistors were a germanium point-contact variety. Vulnerable to overheating and meltdown, their use was limited stictly to low-power applications--tiny transistor radios, for instance. Silicon transistors cost so much more and varied so widely form batch to batch that all high-fidelity audio equipment used vacuum tubes.
In 1965 stereo recording had been around for 7 years. LPs came in two versions--mono and stereo. Back then, stereo was still controversial(!) Some critics denounced the added expense of a second (stereo) speaker and a second mono amplifier and preamp--"Why would anyone want to listen to the same sound twice?" complained one columnist in High Fidelity Magazine circa 1960.
Die-hard audiophiles still mourned the passing of the 78 r.p.m. shellac disc, and lamented that the new 33 r.p.m. stereo process just didn't sound as good.
From the early 1900s through the 1960s pianos proliferated with wild abandon. You found pianos everywhere--in schoolrooms, in apartments, in meeting-halls, in churches, in homes far and wide across the United States. Anyone interested in music owned or rented one. Pianos were cheap. They were reliable. --Especially compared to fragile vacuum-tube-based instruments like the Hammond Novachord. introduced in 1939 and discontinued because its hundreds of tubes made it too unreliable and expensive for a public used to sturdy pianos. In the early 60s every music store stocked aisles of piano sheet music.
Today, in 1994, the situation has reversed. Piano sheet music can't be found for love or money. (As a kid I remember walking into a large record store. Half the aisles crammed with sheet music, the other half with LPs. And that was barely 30 years ago.) Music stores today sell digital recording media--prerecorded CDs, MiniDiscs, DCC tapes, etc. You won't find sheet music today next to the CDs or the cassettes. Guitar tablature rules the sheet-music roost--and the electric guitar has completely usurped the piano's place in 'musical' homes.
Today, digital technology gives us book-sized integrated circuit boxes that counterfeit the sound of a concert grand. In fact a friend mentioned that he found it embarrassing to listen to some classical piano CDs because the acoustic recording often sounded worse than the module in his studio.
Based on a handful of VLSI microchips, today's digital instrument is far more reliable than its acoustic counterpart. Digital modules stay in tune forever. You can kick the smaller boxes across a football field without harming them because they have no moving parts.
This has rendered moot Ivor's discussion of sustained piano tones. A digital instrument has envelope controls: one touch of a button and the tone hangs on endlessly. With MIDI, invdividual piano tones can be orchestrated, with sustained tones assigned to long notes and normal notes allotted to all other pitches.
But perhaps the biggest difference between 1993 and 1965 is hard cash. in the last 28 years piano prices have skyrocketed. Spinets now cost $2500 to $3000, while fresh-from-the-factory Steinway concert grands run $35,000-$50,000! And so in the 1990s almost no one buys new grand (or what Ivor would call `real') pianos. And hardly anyone can afford to have them tuned. A piano-tuner often charges as much as one of the cheaper used digital modules!
More and more piano stores are closing their doors...or selling the much cheaper digital instruments. Most of the digital instruments offer more than one timbre--near-perfect Rhodes electric piano, pipe organ and string section as well as Steinway, Young Chang and Boesendorfer samples.
It's become a real challenge to ferret out a store in a major city that still sells nothing but acoustic pianos.
This is more than inflation. There has been a vast increase in the real cost of pianos--over and above inflation. Consider: in 1950 the dollar was worth at least 10 times what it is today. A $2000 grand piano (1950 dollars) would cost $20,000 1994 dollars. But concert grands today cost at least twice as much. This means that in the last 45 years acoustic pianos have risen in price 2 to 3 times faster than the rate of inflation.
But a digital synth module costs about 300 1994 dollars. The cheapest equivalent--the tube-based electronic organs of the 1950s--went for about $600 in 1950. ($6000 in 1994 dollars.) Alas, the tube organs of the 50s sounded nothing like a piano... while today's digital widgets often surpass CD recordings of the real thing!
In short, the world has changed so much since 1965 that Ivor's article today is interesting mainly for its historical perspective. It provides fascinating info on forgotten byways of the piano's evolution. It also offers a vivid snapshot of the transition from acoustic to digital electronic instruments.
This process continues. Orchestras throughout the country are going bankrupt. The tremendous cost of live performers can't be sustained by any but the largest cities. At the same time, electronic instruments abound in film scores and popular music...and "live musical entertainment" almost invariably means digital keyboards and/or electric guitars.
How soon will digital instruments outperform their acoustic ancestors? Impossible to say. There's a long way yet to go. Remember: integrated circuits are still brand new (relatively speaking). The first integrated circuit was fabricated in 1957; the very first commercial digital synthesizer sold in 1980. Give digital instruments another 30 or 50 years and they will in all likelihood prove themselves more expressive, more subtle and more beguiling to the ear than their acoustic counterparts. [ B. Mclaren, August, 1993]
SHALL WE IMPROVE THE PIANO?
By IVOR DARREG, COMPOSER & ELECTRONIC MUSIC CONSULTANT
[1967 version]
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This booklet was written in 1965 and revised with expansions in 1967. Profound changes in socioeconomic conditions have occurred in the intervening twenty-six years such that the piano is no longer the Only Game In Town. Indeed many younger people have never played a real piano, and their only acquaintance with its sound is via recordings and broadcasts. In the broadcast and recording studios, tone-quality is drastically modified, and the speakers used in the average listener's equipment today are totally unlike the soundingboards of pianos. Then too, many sounds purporting to be piano tone actually come from synthesizers and samplers. Today's keyboards do not have to be tuned; real pianos have to be tuned twice a year. Maintenance and repair of pianos is a dying profession. So our original thesis, that inventors had been trying to improve the the piano for nearly two centuries, has been uprooted and made totally anachronistic by the current keyboard instruments on the market, which generally are more computer than keyboard string instrument.
Meanwhile almost all the sounds originating from real pianos go through miles of wire and dozens of electronic modules and steps of modulation and demodulation and/or analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversions before today's listeners get to hear them; and therefore the changes are so extreme that any improvement of the acoustic piano itself is going to be masked out beyond recovery. In spite of anything and everything that members of the hidebound Musical Establishment may say, it's too late to change back, and this is almost proved by the way in which KEYBOARD is replacing PIANO in common parlance. The present writer plays electronic keyboards and gets heard through recordings. Fait accompli that we must live with. -- Ivor Darreg, August 1993
SHALL WE IMPROVE THE PIANO?
We live in an age of mechanical and electronic marvels. Planes fly faster than sound; detergents clean better than real soap; shoes made of the new synthetic rubber material cost more than those of genuine leather (excuse me, looks as though I had better add chemical marvels to the list!); saccharin in 550 times sweeter than sugar, and hasn't any ugly calories; television is adding color; if your hi-fi isn't stereo, the neighbors' dogs will ostracize your dog; cameras set the stop on their own leses and develop and print their pictures in less than a minute; DDT keeps the flies under control, while DDD lets you dial wrong numbers in distant cities; supermarkets are bigger than ever, you walk farther than ever inside them, and you wait longer than ever in line at the checkstand to pay for your Instant This and Quik-Fix That; pants now come with built-in creases and no belt needed, but cars have belts; streetcars and intraurban trains have been replaced by busses that don't go where (nor when!) you need to go; and now yours truly has invented spoken mathematics, so that one day you can talk to a computer and it will answer you back.
All this means advancement, and change, and irreversible progress, so that we can't turn the clock back no matter how much we sometimes want to. Even our caveman stuff must be updated: look at the Flintstones! The rate of change is itself accelerated: things get obsolete long before they wear out, and this disquieting fact is more evident today than it was as recently as three or four years ago.
O.K.--progress and change and improvement and innovation--but while you're at it, take a look at that piano over there (or the one in your friends' house if your apartment manager forbids you to make your own music), and ask the obvious questions: Is the piano up-to-date? Can't it benefit from all this new knowledge we have and all this fever or creative innovation? Are pianos 20th-century instruments? Here, in this seventh decade of the twentieth century? Let's invent something better! Onward and Upward!
Oh, sure--I've thought about this subject before--but matters didn't really come to head till quite recently: in Time magazine, for April 30, 1965, Page 52, there is a brief account (illustrated) of the proposals of the Europeanconcert pianist, Mme. Monique de la Bruchollerie, who claims the "the piano is dying;" and pianists, too, are succumbing to exhaustion. Modern piano music (or at least, the arrangment and adaptations the concert-perofrmer is expected to play) demands unreasonable contortions of the player, and prodigious muscular expenditure as well.
All tight, I'll go along with that: I have seen some concerto performances that were true athletic events (hence my use of "seen" rather than "heard"). Let me tell about one: A handsome young fellow, lithe and supple, who obviously could have made the Olympics, sat down to the super-colossal concert grand in a well-appointed college auditorium, and started off with the Bach Prelude and Fugue in C# minor (Book I, Well-Tempered Clavier), and before we could catch our breath, it was over! Without a single wrong note or the slightest slackening of pace, he sped through is intricate composition at nearly twice the usual rate. Before anyone fully realized what had happened, he was off into one of the later Beethoven Sonatas, and this was over far too soon--it was rather like a 331/3 record accidentally played at 78. This guy could have done the Chopin `Minute Waltz' in 25 seconds!
On and on he went. He didn't run down; he didn't seem to tire or flag at all! What should have been a 90-minute program (and surely was planned to be such by the authorities in charge) was over in something like 55 minutes. Remember, not a wrong note despite the killing page; proper dynamic shadings; no irritating idiosyncrasies or `arty' mannerisms. Most of us in the audience were conscious that this was a race; the fellow was out to beat the clock. He certainly did. And our applause was the kind that would have been tendered at a track meet or rowing contest: it wasn't too hard to imagine the coach (I simply can't bring myself to use the term `music teacher' here) egging him on to Give His All for Dear Old X.Y.Z.
Physically, this was a tremendous achievement,and it required long practice and self-discipline. Technically, it was a triumph. But as a composer, I think this was a false goal for the peformer to have sought and attained. Yes, he proved it could be done, and undoubtedly he shaved a few minutes off the best previous performance records--and any partisans of Messrs Czerny, Tausig, Hanon & Company were no doubt simply drooling over this resounding demonstration of the technical efficacy of their methods. I am convinced that practice makes perfect; I have to believe it after that exhibition.
But actually, this victory comes about a century too late. It was back in 1865 that traveling virtuosi were dazzling and amazing audiences with the Lisztian and Thalbergian antics of seeing how many strings and/or hammers they could break in an evening's concert. This kept up till the cast-metal frame and improved wire for piano strings became generally used.
There wasn't any electronic amplification in those days, so the piano had to be made mechanically strong. Naturally, there was a limit to this, and somewhere around the turn of the cntury this limit was reached. In againing volume and auditorium-fillilng power, the piano's tone lost the neatness and precision of the harpsichord and was so far removed from its more immediated ancestor the clavichord that he latter was uttelry ignored. No one at the time really cared, since the Zeitgeist of the Romantic period was quite in tune with this evolution of piano tone.
So the piano reached and held to a static summit. Some people called, and still continue to call, this "the perfection of the piano." As the author Lewis Mumford points out somewhere, the advanaced inmanufacturing techniques consequent upon the Industrial Revolution were reflected int he mass-producting of good quality pianos, so that the piano at the close of the 19th Century was a shining example of 19th-century engineering.
With no phonographs and no radios to compete against, the parlor upright was the principal medium for home entertainment, and this stimulated the production of sheet music and thus the development of an enormous, wide-ranging piano literature.
These and other factors working together created a status quo that has endured for quite a while. A certain feel fo the piano action agains thte player's giner, a certain quality of tone, a certain volume range, a certain expressiveness due to the sympathetic vibrations of the strings when the damper pedal is operated--all this is taken for granted by composers and arrangers and teachers and pupils alike. Whether any of these characteristics or factors could be different is seldom discussed, hardly ever challenged. That's not so bad in itself, but the religious and pseudo-mystical veneration and abject unthinking worship of the Piano Idea have now, in 1965, become so out-of-tune with the general scheme of things, and thus has come about so gradually and imperceptibly, that we have an unconscious conflict on our hands. As the pyschoanalysts are only so glad to tell us, unconscious conflicts can do a great deal of harm. This is so whether they be just within one individual, or in society at large, as in the case we are now considering.
We left Mme de la Bruchollerie cliff-hanging there on the first page, so it's time now to evaluate the significance of her proposals. She plans to have a curved keyboard instead of the present straight one, rather like a section of ellipse, thus:
Obviously, this is a good idea. The arms would follow the arm of a circle, or the section of an ellipse, more easily and naturally than the straight-line pattern of keyboard now in use. One's seating posture would be improved, and there wouldn't be so much lost motion.
But this idea is not new. We don't have to worry about patents and copyright in dicussing it, for the Clutsam keyboard (illustrated in The Oxford Companion to Music) came out some years ago. While adapting a piano to such a curved keyboard presents some minor mechanical problems and necessarily raises the cost because of the more complicated and elongated shape of key required, this is no insuperable difficulty. Perhaps such keyboards can be fitted to electronic organs, where the curved shape will not raise the cost so much. For that matter, theatre pipe-organs have had a horseshoe or curved semicircular arrangement of some or all their stop-tablets for 40 or 50 years--so applying this idea to the keyboard istelf is an obvious step.
Mme de la Bruchollerie also proposes that the pedals of the piano be replaced by curved bars running concentrically the entire length of the keyboard. This would be a fairly simple matter to accomplish mechanically.
Now we come to something a little more controversial: she proposes that the compass of the piano keybaord be extended in both direction from its present 71/4 octaves. The Time article is somewhat abiguous here: Does "5 notes at the bottom and 10 notes at the top" refer to white keys or to the white andblack keys together? Probably we are to take this as meaning white keys and assume that the new compass would be 9 or even 91/2 octaves. As the music critic Albert Goldberg points out in an article written in The Los Angeles Times Calendar for Sunday May 22, 1965, the lowest and highest notes on the present standard 71/4-octave piano are unsatisfactory, and I couldn't agree with him more! I have had to tune those notes, and I have had to put up, when playing the piano at various gatherings, with the unsatisfactory way these notes had been mistuned by otherwise expert tuners. I hard every compose for those notes because the last 1/2-octave in the bass is usually mere noises, and in "spinet" pianos this may be true of the entire bottom octave or more. The top octave, even in the best pianos, is more noise than tone, with a disagreeable "rap" or "knock" to it, and the tones die away so quickly that they are practically meaningless. Extend the compass in either direction, and the situation would rapidly get worse. However, pianos with eight octaves have been made, either going down to the 32-foot sub-contra C of 16 Hertz (hew term for `cycles per second') or going from sub-contra F just below the present A to an F a Fourth above the present top C.
It might be well to point out that the piano for which Beethoven wrote his sonatas had only 5 octaves compass, and we do not very often feel the want of the extra two octaves. It shouldn't be too surprising and amazing that certain pitches are better produced by the piano's method than are others.
Now here get really contrversial: she proposes some kind of pushbutton mechanism whereby a single piano key will sound from 2 to 12 notes at a time. This isn't exactly new: harpsichords as well as organs have had couplers for centuries. And accordions have bass-buttons which sound two notes at once (octaves) or three or four (several kinds of chords) at once, and they may have couplers proper on the treble keybaord. Then there is the Yoor Double-Keyboard piano which evidently borrows from the harpsichord the idea of two sets of strings, each with its own keyboard, an octave apart, and the ability to couple the two keyboards so that runs and scales in octaves become easy and fluent, and teneths are no more trouble than thirds on present pianos.
Perhaps I sound too critical here. It may look as though I were bent on giving this concert pianist a rough time. Far from it--where so many concert pianists are highly conformist robots, out of whom all original and creative ideas have been trained, so that they become athletic champions as I have already hinted, or they become as it were musical-typewriter operators--Mme de la Burchollerie admirably distinguishes herself by daring to stand up against the long-entrenched, hidebound, rockribbed, frozen-in-solid-concrete, set-in-their-ways vested interests, and demand a change. This takes courage, in case you have never tried anything of the sort. There is no department of life today, not even the orthodox religions or the banking fraternity, quite so status-quo-oriented and reactionary as the piano-making, piano-selling, and piano teaching people. Maybe it gives them a feeling of security, sadly wanting in the contemporary scene, to have successfully resisted change and invention for so many, many years; I don't know for sure, but I can't conscientiously allow them any other excuse.
If the ideas of Mme de al Burchollerie are not so new, this is not her fault! There is very little information available to the average musician about the history of the piano, and about the attempts to improve it, and about the inventions patented during the last hundred or more years, pertaining to the piano. The music student, no matter how intelligent, is made to feel as though he were committing a grave sin if he so much as starts to think about these matters. "No, mustn't touch! Big Brother Knows Best!" Some of the important, legitimate reasons why there have not been certain changes in the piano are never given. For example, many fine ideas cost too much to produce in quantity. Or, at the time they were first thought of, the proper materials and tools did not exist, or were too scarce, or cost too much. Again, there is an enormous piano literature, the most important items of which were composed early or in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. At that time, the piano sounded a certain way, and had certain characteristics, such as the feel of the action; and the basic principles of playing technique had been developed, so that if we are to give authentic performances of these masterworks today, and to re-create the atmosphere in which and for which they were composed, we must not change the piano too much, lest our interpretations become distortions, falsifications, even perversions of the original. (What would a Chopin Nocturne sound like, if it were played on a quartet of banjos? What would be opening bars of Beethoven's Sonata Pathetique sound like, played form a church-steeple on an electronic carillon?)
This deplorable lack of information and lack of communication has caused a terribly shameful waste of time an effort: hundreds of people of all ages and walks of life have re-invented the same improvments or changes of modifications of the piano, and often they have never found out that these ideas had been invented, and even patented, 50 or 70 years or 125 years before. (I have to laugh, though, at one such affair: the `standard' work on piano history. Albert E. Wier's The Piano, devotes considerable space ot the futile endeavours to develops a downward-striking action back as ealy as 1720, and how this effort was abandoned as impossible. It was only a few months after getting the book that I had an opportunity to play a Schiff portable piano, which had a perfectly workable downward-striking action. So be careful, before you say it can't be done.)
Because so much information has been withheld (whether deliberately or unintentionally, we don't go into that here) from the people who certainly have a right to know it, the piano has become a What without How or Why--a mystery enclosed within a riddle wrapped up in an enigma. This well may be the result of a tendency that operated through the first half of the Twentieth Century: Overspecialization. The pianist hardly ever knows how to adjust the action or fix a sticking key, whereas the violinist must tune his instrument before every performance, put on new strings, and occasionally adjust the bridge to keep it from falling over. The piano tuner and repairman are usually calle din only when it is too late. The piano is regarded as primarily a piece of furniture, an element in the decor, a status symbol, and is kept polished and dusted--but tuned? Oh my no! Why bother? And besides the kids wouldn't appreciate it anyway! Is it any wonder than children do not develop a high sensitivity to music when brought up in such an atmosphere?
On the other side of the fence, the tuner isn't supposed to bother himself with musical or aesthetic questions, so there isn't supposed to be much communication between player (or teacher) and tuner. Even thought the tuner applies physical, logical processes he seldom knows what they are, why they came to be tuned the way they are, or whether the present piano tone and effects could be obtained by any other means. The physicist, too, is expected to keep his hands off musical instruments as his nose out of them--his advice and knowledge are haughtily spurned. This is downright cruel!
Hardly a recipe for progress!
Another consequence of this overspecialization and lack of communication among those who should be equally concerned withthe progress of music, is that an uneblievable amount of misinformation and badly-garbled data is handed down from teachers to pupils, from concert performers to interviewers, and from one book on music to another. For instance, a) there is characters in keys; b) pianists can `color' their tones by proper finger- arm- and wrist-manipulations; c) pianists can impress vibrato on their tones; d) this pianists gets a more romantic, more expressive, or warmer tone out of a given piano than this rivals do; e) one can alter a tone of a given piano-key after it has been struck and while it is being held down (without using the pedals). All those statements are false. No matter how famous the people who have believed in them, I still say that statements a, b, c, d, & e are purest baloney. I could give a whole long list of such erroneous beliefs, but why overplead my case? The correct explanations are available from your library, unless you live in small community. (Further information in the Appendix.)
I haven't said anything about the player-piano; perhaps this is the place to do so. Recently there has been a revival of interest in it, maybe because of our contemporary preoccupation with autmoation, cybernetics, etc. There also seems to be an element of nostalgia and reminiscence connected with it. Anyway, the fact that player pianos and the quality reproeducing pianos such as Welte and Ampico are practicable, were sucessful, and were accepted in their time, bears out the untruth of the statements b c d e above and sheds a small light on the erroneousness of a. If the piano were not so completely mechanical, and if there were such means of an individual playuers controlling tone-quality and vibrato as so many has imagined was possible onthe piano, then the player-roll performance wouldbe rejected as hopelessly inadequate. It is true that the ordinary bar-room or nickelodeon type of player-piano had no dynamic range, playing at a uniform loudness-level unless some human being turned the proper lever to make it louder or softer. Even here, a skillful piano-roll arranger can suggested many of the nuances of rhythm and accent, just as an organist of any ability at all can make you forget that all he can do is turn the wind-streams in the organ-pipes on or off.
However, at the turn of the century the player-piano acquired a dimension of expression, viz: the damper and una corda (loud and soft) pedals could be controlled by the roll, adn the loudness of each note could be specified, making such a player-mechanism and its proper roll the equal of a human performer on the piano. This advanced machinery was too expensive for the general market,many persons have never had the opportunity of hearing it in action; and therefore the teachers, critics and concert pianists down therough the decades have been enjoying the pleasures of Schadenfreude ridiculing and belittling the player-piano, denouncing all its works and pumps.
Perhaps the recent apperance of a series of phonograph records made from Welte reproducing rolls will set the hi-fi addicts stright, if no one else. These rolls were discovered hidden away in some long-forgotten attic or cellar, and they had been prepared from actual recordings by an ingenious electrical mechanism, that took down the details of pedalling and dynamics (force with which each key was struck). Some famous pianists were induced to make recordings, so these have historical value. But the point I wish to stress here is that the existence of such mechanisms and the results they achieved show conclusively the limitations ofthe piano and what these limiations are. This disclosure in turn will be of crucial importance in helping to answer our title question about improving the piano. The timbre of a given piano tone is firmly tied to its loudness, save for the slight alteration which the una corda pedal can made on some pianos. The proportion of noise to tone is also dependent somewhat upon the loudness of the tone,and sets a "floor" under the extreme of "ppp" and "ceiling" to the maximum "fff."
Inferior pianos buzz and rattle their insides long before fff is reached, and somewhere around pp or not quite that soft, the action makes too much noise and tone just isn't heard through it. As for ppp, it simply doesn't exist on inferior or worn-out pianos: below a certain dynamic force, the action `blocks' and refuses to function at all. It takes a really good piano to play ppp. Even then a composer is not safe in writing the direction ppp: if his score falls into the hands of a sforzando-type personality, everything will get played too loud and that's that. I should know: this has happened to my pieces many times. Since the delicate gradations of loudness are almost all the piano has to offer in the way of expression, while most other instruments can vary their timbre, e.g. organ, violin, trumpet, guitar, etc, the pianist must get this dynamic scale under control from end to end.
To go on about the limitations and characteristics: Every piano tone is a damped oscillation--the vibration has decrement--each and every tone dies away, rapidly or slowly depending upon the pitch of the note and particular piano manufacturer's design engineering. As the bass strings are heavier, they can store more energy from the hammer-blows. Thus the bass tones sustain longer.
ENVELOPE OF A LOW PIANO TONE ENVELOPE OF A HIGH PIANO TONE
If the above sounds too much like "engineerese" to you, let me translate it into "musicianese:" every piano tone has a built-in DIMINUENDO. The "decay" with time is much as diagrammed in the "envelopes" shown above. We are trained or conditioned as listeners to discount this eternal diminuendo.
More or less willingly, we go along withteh illusion that the tones are sustained. One way of becoming aware of this situation--available to some of you--is to listen to a recording of piano tones played backwards. The first experience of this is amazing and indescribable. It just doesn't sound as though it come possibly have come from a piano!
This perpetual diminuendo, which imposes severe restrictions on composers and arrangers, continually inspires people to try inventing some kind of sustaining method or device. Take such a passage as this, which is quite practical on an organ, but a piano inevitably distorts it:
By the time the fifth measure is reached, the high D-flat would have died down to inaudibility on any piano, since the notes in the other part would "mask" is out even if any echo managed to survive that long. So the pianist usually `cheats'--he disregards the ties and gives Db an extra whack or two, or he uses the damper pedal (the bass strings whose overtones are near enough to that high Db will respond by sympathetic vibration and will sustain it longer than the treble strings could). If he takes the latter course, the pedal effect muddies up the counterpoint. According to some books, back in the allegedly good old days--1850 or 1890 or such a matter--the pianists usually reiterated such a high note, mandolin-fashion, but that doesn't seemto be good etiquette any more. Maybe it's felt to be hurdygurdyish --Be that as it may, an action repairman spends far too much of his time readjusting the "repetition mechanisms" on each note of the piano, when you consider that this feature is hardly ever employed nowadays.
An arranger encountering such a passage in an orchestral score will move the whole thing down two octaves, or convert it into some kind of arpeggiated flimflam. In the days of the harpsichord, the way out of such a situation would have been the trill; but the piano's trill is quite a different breed of cat. Shall we repress such ideas, or shall we invent a super-piano that can sustain high notes?
Here we go again. Sustaining keybaord stringed instruments were invented in 1625 and maybe before that--a century before Cristofori's pianoforte! The prototype of such instruments, the vielle, hurdy-gurdy, or organistrum, which has a simplified keyboard and a rosined wheel turned by a hand-crank, is said to be about a thousand years old. In any case it is as old, or older than, the clavichord and harpsichord ideas.
Yet the young fellows who have a right to know about it are never told these things, so the keyboard bowed-stringed instrument keeps on getting invented over and over, with wasteful duplication of effort. In recent years, progress has been so great in the field of electronic organs (please don't judge them by what is now on the market) that a satisfactory bowed-string tone from a keyboard at a reasonable price will doon be attainable without having to do any more battle with the mechanical problems inevitable in a keyboard instrument with actual bowed strings.
Other means of sustaining tone were tried: the 19th-century Melopiano which contained mechanisms to make the hammers hit again and again as long as the key was held down; this has been tried with many variations (most recent, probably, an application of the torque-amplified and servo principles, such that an big high-powered mehanism delivers hammer-blows and at the same time transmits back to the key a proper `feel' so that the pianist's touch and pressure willbe correct.) John Hays Hammond (no relation ot the Hammond organ) developed an electronic regenerative piano which supplied energy back to the strings to keep them vibrating. Before the days of amplifiers, about 50 years ago in fact, M. L. Severy developed the Choralcelo which used electrical impulses to drive the strings of a piano through electromagnets: this produced a sustained tone, yet did not interfere with the normal playing on the very same strings with an ordinary hammer-action.
While other people with different backgrounds may disagree with me, I feel confident in prophesying that this problem of sustaining a tone while retaining the expressive features of the piano, will be solved by electronic means not using strings or action at all, so attempts to improve the piano proper in this direction hold no promise.
Let's get back to piano strings: To withstand the force of the hammer-blows, and to produce a loud enought one, the strings of a piano must be comparatively thick--about 1 mm.--and stretched very tightly--the nearly 250 strings of a grand may add up a tension of 10 to 20 tons! It has been estimated that if an ordinary piano has been allowed to drop in pitch to 435 Hz for Middle A, raising it to the standard 440 will add half a ton of tension to the frame. Having performed this operation a number of times, I would agree. Certainly it uses up lots of `elbow-grease.'
The tight tension is needed also because these thick strings would behave like rods rather than strings if they were loose (that is, they would sound like clock-chimes). Since the bass strings of a piano are wound with one or twolayers of copper wire to lower their pitch despite the great tension, their overtones are not exactly harmonic, indeed they are actually out of tune with themselves. Thus no piano can ever be perfectly in tune all over, quite apart form the question of temperament. This problems is more serious on the piano than it is onthe harpsichord, and much more serious on the compact "spinet" or "vertical" pianos than it is on a full-sized grand or upright.
The damper-pedal or "loud" pedal raises all the dampers from the strings whether the correponding keys are depressed or not. This alters the tone-quality of any note, by adding the sympathetic vibrations of other strings to the vibrations of the strings actually struck. This constitutes the only exception, and a minor one at that, to our assertion above that nothing can be done to a piano tone once its key has been struck and held down.
Throughout most of the compass, there are three strings to a note, two to a note in the important part of the bass compass. While these unisons may be in almost precise tune when freshly tuned, they go out of tune slightly differently, and so in a normal piano under average circumstances there will be a very slight difference in pitch among the three strings belonging to one note. It is generally too small to be detected, either as a variation in pitch or as a kind of vibrato-quality--it is more subtle than that. The name "chorus effect" has sometimes been given to it. However, the deviations in pitch from one singer to another in a chorus singing a given part, or from one violin to another in the first-violin section of an orchestra, are many times greater than the proper "chorus effect" on the piano that we are considering here. An out-of-tune piano, naturally, will have an exaggerated, irregular, jangling effect from the badly-beating unisons--but we are expected to ignore the fact that some people neglect to have their pianos tuned!
Now, put these three factors together: the irregularly-vibrating bass strings with inharmonic overtones or not-quite-harmonic ones; the sympathetic vibrations of the strings other than those struck; when the loud (damper) pedal is used; and the "chorus effect" of those oh-so-slightly-inexact 3-string unisons belonging to each note. Top-secret "classified," hush-hush and confidential: THE PIANO POSSESSES A VIBRATO! A vibrato-chorus-celeste, if you want to be expansive about it. Why, then, do I say it's "hush-hush?"
Because it's never out in the open: it's concealed by the normal hammer-noises at the beginning of every piano tone, and furthermore, the three factors which go to make it up, help hide each other! Also, it is NOT under the player's control. Violinists make vibrato as they go along; singers train for it; organists pull out the Tremolo knob. But if you're a pianist, you can't do a #%@&* thing about it. (The situation is further comlicated by the fact that pianos are approximately tuned to the 12-tone equally-tempred scale. More on this later.) Some writers about music have praised the damper-pedal as the Soul of the Pianoforte; well, if the damper-pedal is its Soul, then the vibrato-chorus-celeste is the Piano's Unconscious! Have you ever read about it before seeing this page? Not that you wouldn't encounter hints of its existence, if you searched diligently at the biggest libraries.
But I shan't ask you to take my word for it. Hear it for yourself: here's how--
Put up the lid of a grand piano, or remove the front board of an upright. Find the group of 3 strings which is tuned to Middle C. Be sure the damper (loud) pedal is not down. Place the thumb of your left hand against the right-hand-string of the Middle C group of 3, and the forefinger against the left-hand string of this group of 3, so that only the center string of this group is free to vibrate. This will be harder to do on an upright, of course, because you must keep clear of the hammers. On most `verticals' and midget `spinet' pianos this experiement is out of the question--go somewhere else and find a real piano!
Now strike the Middle C key and notice how `dry' and less `rich' the note sounds when only one string is producing it, as compared with the `full' tone you get from all 3 strings when you take your thumb and forefinger away. Be sure you are damping both other strings of the group; if two strings sound rather than only one, you will be cheated of the effect. Do this several times, for the only wayto appreciate the chorus effect is to hear its absence first. You won't wonder anymore why there are three strings to a note.
This done, strike the Middle C key again (without damping two of the three strings; just normal 3-string conditions), put hte damper pedal down, strike the C again, let the pedal up, strike it again, sot aht you will become aware of what the damper pedal does to the tone-quality. You've done this thousands of times, but THIS time, observe; pay attention!
Here comes the exciting experiment: hold your left thumb near the Middle C 3-string group in such a way that you can press it down at a moment's notice to damp all 3 strings quite firmly. Put down the damper-pedal and strike Middle C quite loudly. Immediately without hesitation jam that thumb down to silence all 3 strings. Keeping the damper-pedal down, listen to the note Middle C, coming from all kinds of places EXCEPT the place it's supposed to come from!! Do this over till you get the knack, then try other notes besides C. Time for our blockbuster question: doesn't this note coming from all the other strings than its own proper one, have a really marvelous vibrato? So I have given you the nature of the piano's Subconscious. This hidden vibrato, of a highly complex nature, is the main reason why people will put up with an instrument so imperfect as the piano.
Maybe I had better add another explanation about this sympathetic-vibration business, because it is so important to an understanding of the piano. Everybody knows that if vases, figurines, bric-a-brac, etc. are placed on top of a piano, they may buzz or rattle when certain notes are played. If the vase has a certain easy mode of vibration, it will vibrate when supplied with energy at the proper frequency, that is, when excited byt he note it happens tobe tuned to. Usually, this can be verified by tapping the vessel gently, when it may give the same note that habitually buzzes--or a note harmonically related to it, such as the Octave.
If you sing loudly into a piano with the damper pedal down--sing a vowel such as ah or oo or ee--and your tone is steady and in tune with some note in the middle register of the piano--the strings and soundingboard will echo your vowel back to you with a surprisingly faithful quality of that vowel. The reproduction will be better in the case of oo ah aw ah than it will be for ob a er ay i ee, and the results you will obtain from diphthongs like i ou (as in out) oi yu will be disappointing because you will get a mixture of both vowels composing the diphthong.
This reproduction of a vowel-sound occurs because your voice has overtones, and both the strings whose proper notes are near these overtones and the strings having overtones near the component tones of your voice, respond to the energy present in the soundwaves you are directing at them. They absorb this energy if any component of your tone is sufficiently close to one of their modes of vibration, and when you stop singing, they give back this energy, via the soundboard of course. The amounts of energy involved are less than fleapower: wiggles of a gnat's eyelash would be more like it--but our ears are so sensitive that we hear it in all its subtlety.
One is apt to suppose that because considerable muscular effort is involved in playing the piano, that there will be plenty of power in the sounds produced. Alas! The piano mechanism is quite inefficient in the power-engineer's sense: this is why a concert pianist must be something of an athlete. Still, the piano does not compare badly with other musical instruments in this respect, and the reason is obvious enough: if the choice has to be made between mechanical efficiency and an artistic and balanced tone-quality, the decision will be the same in each case.
This problem of physical effort has stimulated the development of electronic pianos of various kinds, a matter I naturally have opinions on, and to which I will come shortly. Firts, though, I have to finish withe subject of sympathetic vibration, or more prosaically, resonance, and its bearing, in conjunction with overtones, upon the piano's tonal effects.
Suppose you play Contra Ab. This is written in your sheet music. What an understatement! The notation below would be more like it, but even this does not tell the whole story. It can't:
And if your piano has two strings for this note (many do), imagine the diagram is a sort of overlapping `double exposure,' with two of everything. The lozenge-shaped high A-natural is the pitch ofthe longitudinal vibration for this note on some pianos I have tried--it can vary up or down considerably. None of the overtones shown will have quite the theoretical pitch--usually they are noticeably sharper. Nor do they coincide with the conventional pitches of the 12-tone tempered scale. To all this very complex aggregate of tones, add some noise from the hammer-blow, and don't forget that the proportion of these component tones and noises changes CONTINUALLY during the time the note sounds.
The complex of tones of piano bass strings "roll" and beat and throb with themselves. When the dampers are all raised off the other strings byt he damper pedal, every other string that has a component tone near any of the component tones of the struck string or strings, starts vibrating! The overall effect is much too comlicated to write down. It rivals an orchestra score or the sound of an organ in complexity. Thus the piano produces many more pitches (and noises) than anyone will believe.
Since the overtones (I can't used the ordinary term `harmonics' here becuase they deviate somewhat from the exact integral multiples of the fundamental frequency that they would have to have in order to justify the term `harmonic') of any one piano string do not coincide exactly with those of any other string, the resonances or sympathetic vibrations will not be as great as they might be, and some will be much greater than others, in an apparently capricious manner. The result is that `beats' or wavering sounds are heard when those two or more tones note quite the same pitch react upon one another. Hence the vibrato-chorus-celeste you heard when you performed the third Middle C experiment.
In the diagram of one note, Contra Ab, on the preceding page, the little clouds of dots symbolize the higher overtones too numerous to notate clearly, the plus + is a futile attempt to symbolize the noise or indefinite-pitch elements in this one note. Now, stretch your imagination and try to coonceive a chart covering your whole wall, which would still be insufficient to record what your piano does when you play
The above notation, or any similar passage in the piano literature, leaves so much out, and takes so much for granted, that it is almost useless as an indication of what actually happens. Look on it more as a set of directions, a recipe, what to do to get approximately what the composer intended. Musical notation is ambiguous and incomplete--often deliberately so! (I have taken up this subject elsewhere, and will again; I can't go into it at too great length here.)
The important point just now is that hte same written passage will sound differently on different pianos, when played by different people, and even on the same piano at different times. I'm going to drag in a little sociology or something of the kind, and add that it doesn't sound the same in August 1965 as it would have sounded to comparable audiences in 1915 or 1865 or 1836. We live in different environments than they did; we had different conditioning than they had; and we certainly use a radically different frame of reference from what theirs was.
Before you give the go-ahead signal to improve the piano, and before you dream up ways it might eb improved, think things over for a while.
Which century, which cultural viewpoint, which enviornment, does the complex aggregation of sounds mentioned inthe fourth paragraph above this one, actually express? The 18th century with the tidiness and formality of the Baroque? The mid-20th century, with our love of precision and inquiry into the minute details of the atom and the elementary particles, coupled witht he attempt to grasp immense distances of outer space? Obviously neither. As I said already, the paino reached a static summit in the 19th century: the 19th century is built right into the piano and comes out through its tones. The cast-iron frame and the wooden machinery of the action are certainly not 20th-century idas. (There has been considerable resistance to the introduction of such 20th-century concepts as the aluminum alloy frame and the mahogany-plywood soundbound.) The very size of the piano, whether grand or upright, its heavy weight, are out of keeping with the other furniture in our homes and apartments. Yet the attempt to make a tiny piano, scaled-down to fit apartments and trailers, sacrifices tone-quality and represents a retrogression from teh 19th-century ideal--that such a piano still has 88 notes doesn't foll all the people allthe time. All the advertising progaganda in the world isn't going to make me call these miniature pianos an improvement.
Enter another villain upon the scene. Extollers and exponents and eulogizers of the piano seem always to assume that all the pianos inthe world are in tip-top, perfect, crackjack, exuberantly dandy condition.
Would that it were so! I've been about as guilty as the people I'm complaining about: I've written passages for a sort of ideal piano that you seldom meet on land or sea. This wonderful instrument that you always keep hearing about but seldom actually hear, was made about 1887 or 1893, probably by some famous European firm, though it might have been made in this country. It was miraculously transported to 1965 by time-machines,before anybody could abuse it, neglect it, or wear it out. Its factory finish, voicing, and adjustment were intact. This 7-foot grand was installed in some moderate-sized recital hall, adn carefully tuned. It had no buzzes, rattles, squeaks, or sticking keys. All the bass strings were lively, and the treble as clear as the proverbial bell. It could whisper or shout, never sounding forced or strained.
The performer has telepathic ability. If the composer has written something impossible to realize on the piano, the performer simply hypnotizes you, and you think you are hearing it: molto contando, quasi flauto, quasi violino, quasi corno, con fuoco, con amore, piu dolce, and all the rest. The pianist has practiced the piece hundreds of times, never makes mistakes, and with his or her infallible ESP always knows exactly what the composer had in mind.
To read some of the reviews and newspaper accounts of piano recitals, you would think all the foregoing was true. If I knew a reliable spiritualist medium, I'd like to get Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin on the ouija-board someday and find out what they really thought about the performance of their works in 1965, on broken-down old uprights in cramped apartments, on beautifully-refinished-outside but woefully out-of-tune parlor grands in otherwise well-kept homes, on woebegone superannuated thumpboxes with bass strings that go thump-thus-bump, on little dinky transistor radios at the beaches, or tinny $12.88 record-players with 3" x 4" oval speakers.
What would any 19th-century piano composer think of our 20th-century progress? Improve the piano?! Why, how can you even think of improving it when you neglect hte existing instruments so shamefully? There must be something like 2 million pianos or more still in existence, but how many of them are in tune? Even new ones bought for new homes and still within warranty? How many of them have tired, worn-out bass strings whose windings are loose, so that they go clunk or whunk or thud or buzzes or phqxzz or thdllmp? How many have worn actions, or dampers that don't?
"Tin Pan Alley" is a phrase that you don't hear any more. But the tinpanny pianos that gave the street its name are still very much with us. The flt on piano hammers packs down after thousands of hammer-blows, and if you don't get the repairman who knows piano `voicing' to fix them, then you woo will have tin-pan hands. Genuine Callithumpian ones.
Painos are also eaten up by moths and mice, who find the felt and flue delicious. Leave a piano unplayed and unguarded for months, and yoou may find it inhabited when you come back. Rust also takes its toll--the strings can't sound as well after they start to corrode.
Pianos do not improve with age, as violins and cellos are supposed to do. They can often be rebuilt and reconditioned; I have heard some excellent examples of this. This means in most cases, all new strings and overhauling the action. Many pianos aren't worth it--they have been so thoroughly neglected and have existed so much longer than their reasonable life-span. I'd hate to say what the average age of a piano in an average American dwelling or school is--maybe 50 years wouldn't be too wide of the mark. Years and decades don't mean too much in this connection anyway: a neglected piano ages very rapidly, while a scrupulously cared-for instruments may defythe ravages of time. So being the proud owner of a newer piano is no safeguard--some of them were not built ot last, or are simply too darn smallf or the bass notes they are alleged to produce. We have ben so thoroughly conditioned by having to listen to radios and phonographs with 21/2-inch loudspeakers instead of the 10- or 12-inch ones they should have, that we put up with bassless pianos also.
High fidelity indeed! Most of the music we hear nowadays is through electronic reproduction, but most of this reproduction is only a faint echo of what it could be. The Almighty Dollar is King here, and so I'm afraid the 2-inch and 4-inch loudspeaker will be with us a long time to come. What's this got to do with pianos? A great deal, in 1965. We hear far more reproduced, radio-transmitted, recorded piano sounds than we hear "live" piano sounds. This elementary hard fact of today is bound to influence our judgment, our attitude, and our actions, whether we will or no.
I did not entitle this pamphlet Shall We Change the Piano's Tone? because the reproduction of piano sounds through cheap electronic devices that often we have to hear whether we want to or not, often changes piano tones drastically, and so every one of us has been consciously and unconsciously affected by these modified tones. This could not have been foreseen in the piano's heyday of 1850 or thereabouts. It certainly does not ever improve the effect of anything played on a piano. But it's here and will always be here and I cannot ignore it.
I am a composer and everything I have written for the piano is subject to change without notice. Either I am asked to play it on a piano that is out of tune or has somethign else wrong with it; or I play it on an excellent piano or someone else doesso, but hte recording is reproduced on cheap or badly-adjusted electronic equipment. I can't do a thing about it; neither can my interpreter if he plays it for me. So I can't predict in advance how my composition is going to sound, nor whether this particular opportunity to get it performed is going to be helpful or harmful in the long run. Result: I have turned down many opportunities when I suspected, rightly or wrongly, that the risk was too great.
If this article falls into the hands of someone who loathes me to pieces, then they are asked to substitute the name of their favorite composer for hte vertical pronoun in the above paragraph, for the conclusions will be the same.
I's all very wellf or a successful concerto pianist, such as the one mentioned at the beginning of this document, to prorpose improvements in the piano-to-be-used-in-a-concert-hall. I mean it; why should I want to hurt a fellow-inventor? Especially in this age, which profits by and exploits allthe inventions it can lay its hands on, but treats its inventors with stercoraceous ingratitude? (In that respect we are neither an improvement over, nor any worse than, the 19th century.)
Concert grands are already expensive: $6,000 and more will be asked for one without the slightest shaefaced qualm. What would one of Mme de al Bruchollerie's planned improved ones cost? I'm afraid to think. Fantastic, anyway. I hope she gets one made, or several. It would do the musical world good to be awakened from their Rip-van-Winkle slumbers. This might be an excellent way to accomplish that. In putting my title question--Shall we Improve the Piano?--while I was inspired by the publicity accompanying Mme de la Bruchollerie's proposals, I was not arguing the question whether she should try or not--that gets an unqualified `yes.' No, my question is more general: shall we improve the piano-to-be-sold-in-the-music-store-and-to-be-bought-for-the-average-person's-home-and-and-the-average-church-and-school? Shall we invent attachments for pianos to bring them up-to-date or at least make a stab at it? Shall we mount an advertising campaign to get everyone to throw their old, now-obsolete pianos away and buy new Superpianos? Or, to get personal, Shall I devote my life to the improvement of the piano? Should you? Why? Why not?
I promise to answer most of these quetsions shortly. I have already hinted at answers. Let's take a brief look again at the present situation: myriads of pianos, but many of them too old, too tired, neglected, out-of-tune, out of whack, out of kilter. Shall we scold piano owners and renters, that they ought to take better care of their instruments? I doubt it would do any good; and if I scolded them they would accuse me of being selfish or mercenary or cranky or all three. Besides, there are not enough tuners and technicians and repair shops any more, and the average age of piano tuners and technicians is way up there: 70 has been claimed. With material costs and labor costs up sky-high, the charges for tuning or repairing a piano must necessarily be several times what they were a few years ago, and so far from what they were a few years back, as to defy belief.
When considering an 1880s piano side by side with a Piano That Has To Be Tuned Every Four to Six Months was first mass-produced for the Public, that comparison is utterly impossible. If someone today were to invent an instrument that had to be tuned and adjusted and maintained as much as the piano does, with more than 200 strings and more hundreds of parts int he actions, he would be immediately laughed at as eccentric and frightfully unrealistic about business matters.
The widespread neglect and sorry condition of many pianos is thus due more to economic reasons than anything else. Many more people can afford pianos, or have inherited them, than can afford to have them tuned every time they need it (remember, pianos go out of tune whether they are played upon or not) and as for having them renovated and restored to original factory performance--are you kidding? The picture tube ont he TV burned out last night, and the vacuum-cleaner quit, and after all money doesn't grow on trees. So when the average piano-owner finds out how much a tuning now costs (particularly if the tuner has to raise the pitch), he promptly puts it off till the sixth Tuesday in Octembruary.
Or put yourself in the shoes of the serious young piano student. The record shop downtown just got in two wonderful LPs of Vyatcheslav Bystropal'tsevich Gromkoshumov's version of the Emperor Concerto (funny how Soviety Communists aren't `subversive' when they're pianists!), and Zbigniew Chrzaszcewski's authentic version of Chopin's Polonaises straight from Warsaw. Our student has only so much money to spare and he or she has to choose between having the piano tuned (remember, it will have to be tuned again in a few more months) and buying these records, which will be valuable study material to analyze and emualte, downt hrough many years to come. Where do you think this month's allowance is going to be spent?
Or step into the shoes of the parent, however fond, who has just been ordered by the music teacher to hurry up and get young Jimmy's piano tuned. "What, pay all that money only to have the tuning wasted on those dreadful Hanon finger-exercises and scales?" I wonder how many headache tablets are taken by fond parents under such circumstances. Must be enough to keep the drugstores prosperous.
Little Jimmy is going to get bawled out for not hurrying up and becoming a professional virtuosos overnight, and he's not going to be able to figure out why. If his teacher puts on a student recital, he will acquit himselx creditably, but will never undderstand why the audience is so bored. Nobody seems to bother to tell him or anybody else that the recital insitution has failed to change with the times, lo these hundred years.
Sorry, I'm rambling--but the question of improving the piano is meaningless if we forget whom we're trying to improve it for. Some abstract ideal? No, very real people, such as the boy across the street and girl next door. If the piano were improved, would it make them happier? Should children be forced to go through the conventional piano instruction, and do they have to be disciplined with such boresome things? Did the composer write pieces for people to enjoy, or to torture them?
If people can't afford to keep up their pianos, how could they afford a brand-new Super-piano? So the prospect of bringing some of Mme de la Bruchollerie's proposals, or some of the rbight ideas on the subject Ivor Darreg had when he was 17, or some of the ingenious proposals buried inteh archives of Patent Offices in various countries,, to the marketplace for the general public to enjoy, is extremely small.
So economic considerations make "No" the answer, if you contemplate marketing an improved piano commercially. Those of you acquainted with manufacturing might like, as an intellectual exericse, to figure out what it would cost to re-tool three or four piano factories to turn out super-pianos of one kind or another.
All right, let's get back into our Time Machine and visit the earlier parts of the 19th century again. For quite a while, there was a craze for "Turkish music." Beethoven wrote a Turkish March; other composers would come out with a Rondo alla Turca or something of the kind. How faithful this style was to what they really used to play in Turkey, I have no idea; but it doesn't really matter now. What does matter is that as the nineteenth century progressed, more and more pianos were made with extra pedlas and "stops" to help render Turkish music. Some pianos had a Basoon pedal; this caused a strip of parchment or something of the kind to be pressed against the strings. Banjo might have been a better name for it than bassoon--I believe this latter name has been used. After an idea which was successful on the harpsichord, there might be a Lute stop or pedal. Lute stops on the harpsichords I have examined give a dull, gentler tone, reminiscent of gut strings. This did not seem as much in tuen with the genius of the piano, apparently. At least that's what some writers on the subject say. There might be a bell or something of a mandolin pedal, under any of several names. This would drop little metal affairs between hammer and strings, so that single or something multiple blows would be struck by metal instead of felt. This mandolin effect is coming back into favor for some reason or other. Often there was a Drum pedal, which clobbered the soundboard with a padded drumstick, or a regular piano-hammer.
As time went on, these attachments went out of fashion, lost their social status, and disappeared from nearly all pianos, leaving only three pedals. You never know what the middle pedal will do on a particular piano--sometimes it's a potent soft pedal, a good thing to have; sometimes it raises only the dampers in the bass section; sometimes it's a dummy, doing only what the left-hand, soft pedal proper does; sometimes, on a good-sized grand, it's the sostenuto pedal that holds up one or a few dampers and no others--an interesting effect, perhaps, but how often does anybody use it? [Editor's note: on older pianos the middle pedal shifted the entire hammer mechanism over so that instead of striking 3 piano strings per note the hammer would strike only 1 strings per note. This is now an obsolete practice. I have never encountered a piano on which the middle, or una corda, pedal actually performed its original intended function. On an upright piano I used to own, the middle pedal dropped a piece of felt between the strings and the hammers--an effect reminiscent of a music box under a blanket. Today the middle una corda pedal is an archaeologic relic; only its name survives.]
What composer would dare write for it? He can't depend on it being there. Look for arbitrary this custom is: there must be three pedals, not two or four or six; what the middle pedal does is of no consequence: the left-hand pedal should be a soft pedal, but it doesn't have to be the una corda pedal most grands possess. Since so many pianos are just furniture, to give one's home a better "image," as the advertising man would say, perhaps it doesn't really matter about the pedals, so long as there are three of them! Who would dare ask to play the piano, when the stereo hi-fi or the color TV will surely be turned on?
[Editor's note: in the March 1992 issue of Keyboard a company announced a new keyboard product called the Slam Grand. This, it seems, is a hollow mock-up resembling a grand piano. It is intended for rock videos, as a stage prop, or perhaps furniture for an upscale yuppoid household.]
Well, here we are back to present time again, and did I say those drum-pedals and bassoon-pedals were out of fashion nowadays? Not quite, it seems: the avant-garde composers, such a John Cage (it would be lese-majeste to leave him out of a discussion about improving the piano!) and others, and let's alsomention the duo-piano recording team, Ferranti and Teicher if I have their names spelled right--these people have smuggled the traps and special effects back in under an assumed name: they call it a Prepared piano, and it's the very latest! Pieces of rubber, leather, wood, nuts and bolts; you name it, they've got it. Or maybe theywill get more venturesome still and drum ont he side or top of the piano case. From there on out, the sky is the limit. But don't tell me it's new; I know better. Without intending to be a wet blanket or spoil your fun, I would like to point out that this `prepared piano' affair is a symptom--plain ordinary piano tone can get awfully monotonous after a while, and a composer in the second half of the Twentieth Century can get pretty desperate for something different. I have felt this way too. So if John Cage and his friends and eulators can publicize this situation, more power to them.
And now we come to electrification of the piano. We hinted at it when mentioning the inventions of electronic regenerative sustaining pianos (regenerative here means feeding back some of the amplified energy to the strings to keep them going) and the Choralcelo, whic, as you will remember, drove the strings with correctly-tined interrupted electric corrents. There have been other inventions along this line, but these basic pioneering inventions are typical. The weight, complication,and expense of these devices would have kept them off the market--only the welathiest concert pianists could have afforded them. It would be possible today to accomplish the same results at a fraction of the cost and much more effectively--but why do it, when it's so much easier and less expensive to build an electric organ?
The imperfections in the thick pianos trings, especially the wound bass strings, which give the piano a characteristic personality in its normal percussive damped condition, would show up like the proverbial `sore thumb' in a regenerative instrument with sustained tones. There would be troubles about hte dampers, too, since the strings would try to sound adn fight the dampers' action. All kinds of false tones wouldbe heard, which now are covered up by their quickly dying away. The Choralcelo principle of driving the strings with an independent source of properly-timed electric power impulses, entails a double tuning: i.e., the currents must be tuned as well as the piano strings, and both must be tuned precisely together. This is far too much to ask.
Also, you would be too limited, vis-a-vis the organ, in your range and choice or tone-qualities. If you need to bridge the gap ebtween percussive and sustained tone, to go from organ and piano charactertistics, it is more practical to start from the electronic organ principles, and simulate percussive effects with an organ.
The next step after such sustaining devices was to try electronic amplification of the piano. It works fine withthe guitar, reasonably well with the violin, so why not hte piano? Simplest of all is to fit a contact microphone to the soundboard. This can be used in some situations; however, it picks up damper-thump and assorted noises, so isn't perfect.
Many inventors have explored this field, the best known probably being B. F. Miessner. In the late 1930s the Storytone piano and the Ansley Dynatone were produced on a limited scale.
Many variations of the ideas were tried. In Europe there were such instruments as the Neo-Bechstein. It was thought that electronic amplification would permit a smaller, lighter instrument with shorter, thinner strings, smaller hammers, and a less epxensive case and frame. However, the smaller strings under less tension and only one string to a note (you tried that one-vs.three-string experiment, didn't you?) would not give a `true' piano tone, and some of the drawback nuisance features of the conventional piano were put back to see if they would help.
Sustaining, while not actually achieved, was approached: without any soundingboard, little energy was drained from the struck strings so they kept going much longer. The catch is that we are conditioned toa certain peculiar quality of tone that "ought" to come from all pianos, and one characteristic of this quality is that the tone dies away becuase the soundboard drains energy from the strings via the bridges and dissipates it.
So various gimmicks were tried, some of them ridiculous: coating the strings with glue and sticking hairs or felt-fibres to them so that they would not sustain so long; using permanent magnets to damp thte vibrations; using some kind of mute or blanket to consume the energy; etc. etc. Vestigial soundboards were tried, also, to mimic the normal soundboard's contribution to the tone. So where did this get anybody? Gain all the advantages and novelties of electronic amplification, and then throw them all away, one by one, to keep that sacred, undefined entity, `piano tone,' whatever that means! I almost cried when I read the patent specifications: it seems to me as though the inventors were hiding themselves underneath the bed and then shouting through a microphone! Like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, they were running twice as fast to stay in the same place. If that's improvement I'm a monkey's uncle.
One idea deserves special mention: it is at least theoretically possible to have each hammer strike both a normal string and a short string that is muted so it only makes a noise. Now if you put an electric pickup on both the real string and the dummy one, and connect them in phase opposition so they buck each other out, you can get the hammer-noise to commit suicide and what have you got left? Why, an organ-like tone, hopefully.
But the corollary and eiplogue of this really slays me: later ont he same inventor was working with amplified reed-organs, and he patented a reed-organ with the reeds enclosed in a soundproof box, and a built-in noise-generator, so that hammer-sound were simulated and the tones would have died away at the proper rate, and presto! You have a reed-organ that sounds just like a piano.
Getting back to amplified pianos, I have heard a few, and they are satisfactory over their range, unless the loudspeakers are too small, in which case ff is not good. The instruments I heard were held back from what an amplified piano might accomplish, due to manufacturers' prejudice, no doubt: they could not produce the smooth clarinet-like tones nor the then bagpipe-like tones that can be obtained from positioning the electric pickups in various places along the string. (As a rule of thumb, I may safely state that the quality obtained in picking up the tone at a given point along a string, is the same as that which would be obtained ona conventional non-electric instrument by plucking or striking that string at the same point.)
So one of the main reasons for having an amplified piano at all, the obtaining of different tone-qualities, proved quite practicable through several centuries of experience on harpsichords, and one of the main reasons why the harpsichord has come back to life again and has a future, is deliberately and callously ignored.
(The piano actiona nd hammers being bulkier than the harpsichord jacks, the piano had to give up the harpsichord idea of timbre-variation through plucking the string at different points. By trial and error a compromise quality and hammer-striking place was evolved. Through the middle part of the piano's compass, this is from one-seventh to one-eighth the length of the string. In the bass section it may be less than one-eighth.)
Why spend more money for amplification, if you are not permitted by the piano manufacturers to enjoy any of its advanatages? It just doesn't make sense. Another drawback to this kind of amplifying piano with strings, is that now the gadget has to have two kinds of servicemen, not always available in the same person: a tuner and action-adjuster, and an electronic technician to fix the amplifier and pickups. The reason why so many pianos are unplayable (or should-not-be-playable) today, is actually doubled! Twice as much to go wrong, in two radically different ways! No wonder this form of electronic piano hasn't been a commercial success.
So effort was expended on developing an imitation-piano: somethign that would never need tuning, or at least not for many years; tuning-forks, steel bars, and coil springs are obvious candidates for the job. They can all be struck withsomething like a piano action. They are damped, so that their vibrations die away. A damper pedal can be fitted to behave with them much as the regular loud pedal does on the real piano. While their tones are nothing like those of piano strings--indeed, the idea of a tuning-fork piano is very old and such an instrument would never get out of tune, which is wonderful to think about--but nobody made a commercial success of a tuning-fork piano because its tone is too dull, too monotonous, too insipid...while fork or bar or spring tones are nothing like string tones, they can be made musically satisfactory by an electronic process called--guess what--non-linear distortion. This process gives them perfectly genuine harmonics.
At least one such instrumnet, a short-compass, about 5 octaves, struck-steel-reed-stringless electronically-amplified `piano' (my quote-marks) with a damper pedal, and admirably durable and portable, has reached the market. The one I tried at a music store had an acceptable piano tone-quality when played mf or mp. At f it began to distort a little, and at ff you were unpleasantly aware that it had a rather small loudspeaker. Going from p down to pp, it lost piano timbre and passed throughthe toy-piano quality to that of just plain xylophone. That was 4 years ago--maybe they have improved them since then. Now, the single tones moderately loud were satisfactory imitations of piano tone that I wouldn't criticize. But ah! There's a catch: this particular kind of instrumnet cannot have sympathetic vibration from one note to another as the stringed piano (ordinary or electrically amplified) can and does have. This is the `soul,' the raison d'etre, of The Piano. Take that away, and yolu have not improved the piano; you have destroyed its most important property. Yes, you might put something back to take its place, but that costs too much. What price progress? If the thing didn't try to imitate a piano so closely, it might catch on. A portable that can't get out of tune is an idea with real merit.
To improve the piano electronically, the first thing we did was saw out the soundingbaord. Then to improve it some more, we yanked out all the strings! What next? Why, let's take out the action!
Then how can you still call what's left, a piano? That, my dear Watson, is a matter of Semantics.
Piano is as piano does, or something of the sort. The fact reamains that we can take a sustained tone (well, if you're that ritical, an alternating current) from an oscillator circuit (which now can be very compact, reliable, and transistorized so that it costs next ot nothing to keep it running) and put it through some kind of electronic network that will give it `attack' and `decay' characteristics. In other words, we can take a steady tone and mold it to an `envelope' shape like those shown on Page Six.
We can simulate the piano envelopes very closely, graduating them from those now customary for Sub-Contra A to Top C, if that's what we really want. It certainly isn't what I want, either as performer or as composer, but you can have it if you feel you need it.
We can also give the tones of the sintrument any other envelope, from that of the pipe organ through those of the violin family and the woodwinds through piano to harpischord, clavichord, xylophone,and banjo. We can imitate the reiterated tremolo of the mandolin.
The first electronic instrumnet to reach the commercial market and provide a variety of such envelopes, attack-decay characteristics, or organ-to-percussion effects, whatever you like to callthem, was the Novachord by Hammond. The manufacture of this instrument was uspended for World War II and never resumed. A good many of them are still kicking around, however, and many more electronic organs incorporate similar circuits for `percussion stops.'
You probably have heard a Novachord without knowing it, and you may have heard the experimental record that came out some years ago fo the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer, playing familiar music. THe designers of the Synthsizer must have been heavily influenced by the piano, for they gave most of their tones throughout the demonstration record a piano-like quality. They set up the instrument for a very close simulation of the piano, then for what they considered an improved piano tone, then for several qualities which resemble those of the Novachord more than anything else. The Novachord did not provide any noise-generator to imitate hammer-blocks or plucking noises, yet its realistic envelope countrol came close enough to the piano fro ordinary needs. Perhaps that was the touble: some piano manufacturer may have screamed about `unfair competition' or something. The Synthesizer comes closer to piano tone becuase it can inject noise. Both instruments can imitate the damper-pedal action, but not the sympathetic vibration of the strings-not-struck.
The Novachord was not touch-resonsive: pressing down harder on the keys did not give a louder tone, but means for doing this electronically now exist at a tolerable cost. Please note, however, that since boththe Novachord and the Synthesizer have adjustable vibrato, this can be used to make up for the want of sympathetic vibrations in these instruments--after all, we gave the secret away a few pages back, about hte Vibrato In the Piano's Subconscious and how you could make it come out and say Uncle.
While the music played on it for demonstration purposes is overly hackneyed and familiar, the Synthesizer Record (I understand later and better records have been issued, but I have not yet heard them--later note: as of 1967, good recordings of new music for the Synthesizer are readily available) is an excellent way of learning about hte anatomy of a musical tone, at least certain aspects which concern the piano. The record does not tell the whole story, and perhaps other records will be available someday that will fill in the almost-always-ignored details.
One thing the record makes abdantly clear is that the actual timbre of a tone plays only a small part in detemrining whether we will class it as truly-piano or non-piano: it's the envelope that counts. On the Synthesizer Record is a rendition of Nola that uses a very different timbre thant he usual one, more reedy or violinish than a normal piano tone ever is--but the envelope being normal, we still say "piano." COnversely, if you change a piano tone's envelope too much, it is defeinitely ostracized andkicked out from the Honorable Order of Piano Notes.
I hope it doesn't grate on you too much for me to use Envelope as short for `the manner in which a piano tone or other kind of tone begins and ends.' Attack suggests wartime maneuvers too much for my taste, while Decay conjures up unpleasant allusions to the nighbors' garbage-cans! (Naturally, I put out better garbage than they do.) Unfortunately attack and decay are very firmly entrenched in the technical jargon by now.
The tape-splicers and tape-manipulators, the fellows who now are trying to pre-empt the term Electronic Music for themselves (I gladly welcome themt ot he designation`electronic music,' but I include all kinds of things under the term's ample umbrella that they aren't very interested in) have been having a good time lately, recording piano tones and beheading the hammer-blows, or splicing the tones in backwards so that the envelope is reversed in shape, or filtering them (removing certain frequencies or components from the tones) so that they lose part or all of their pianoforticity. Remove the hammer-blow portion and you get an organ or wind-instrument tone; filter the hammer-blow and you may get a bell or marimba; speed up the tape and what magic: piano becomes harpischord! Slow it downa nd you have a most impressive song.
In a way, they've been improving the piano, without doing anything to the instrument itself, only to its tones trasnferred to tape. They certainly enlarge the tonal vocabulary enormously, and instruct you about the ingredients that go into a piano tone and get hidden underneath allthe hammer-noise. Some experimenters have done the obvious thing: splice hammer-blows in front of violin or flute or horn tones, and you guessed it, this pianizes them. Here we have another reason why pianos couldn't have the range of stops a harpsichord has, with really different timbres: suppose you gave this to the piano, the hammer-noise would obscure all the tone-qualities too much.
To bring the point home, let us take an experiment made about 40 years ago or such am atter, and probably repeated a good many times: a piano was muted (some of the preapred-piano guys doubtless have done this too), muted with heavy layers of felt and rubber or whatever on and between the strings until absolutely no tone, no definite-pitched sound, could come through. Only noise: hammers thudding against something and dampers falling. Pianists were then asked to perform well-known pieces on this`non-instrument.' Everyone was astonished by the results: the average listener coudl recognize nearly all the pieces played! (Could this be the long-sought way to abolish piano tuners? Hmmm?)
From these incredible facts, you can easily deduce that if you improve a piano in the way it most obviously needs improving--by reducing the hammer-noise--by that same token it ceases to be a piano. Some dilemma. Yes, the harpsichor and clavichord make characteristic noises with every tone, but these noises are so much quicker that they do not override the timbre of the sustained portion of the tone. One reason could be that the piano hammer is made of soft, thick felt: when it comes up against the strings, they sink down into it and rise up out of it--thus it takes a small but finite time for the noise, not an infinitesimal instant. THe fact that speeded-up piano tapes are more like a harpsichord and slowed-down harpsichord tapes more like a piano than the normal-speed records in either case, substantiates my argument here.
An intermediate case would be provided by the harp and Spanish guitar. The soft fingers would behave something like the piano's felt hammers. So for pizzicato on instruments of the violin family.
No hammers, no strings, no action, no dampers, no soundingboard. Just a bunch of wires and resistors and capacitors and coils and transformers and transistors (vacuum tubes are so passe, you know). Is this the answer? "No Strings Attached?"
Well, it can be done this way, and with costs of electronic parts and subassemblies coming down and down, soon it will be competetive with the conventional piano. It will weigh less and take up less space, and stay in tune very well. Virtually overwhelming arguments in this day of small rooms and when many people have to move frequently.
But,t here are several buts. It will never sound exactly like a real piano. I have already told you why. But we hear more piano tones throughloudspeakers and radios and phonographs than we hear directly, so this objection loses some of its force. No sympathetic vibration. But we could flavor the tone with vibrato and maybe add some synthetic reverberation. Maybe exchaning sympathetic vibration for less hammer-noise and much better treble notes without pinkty-klank and`rap' would be a sensible take-off.
But: this instrument I am now talking about is not a pianoat heart. It's really an organ PRETENDING to be a piano. The portable affair with hammer-action striking metal bars or reeds, back there a page or two, was still a true percussion instrument. This one I'm talking about now is a sustained-tone instrument with "gates" or "spigots" to shpa ethe tones in sumulation of percussion. Now, many of you won't understand me when I invoke aesthetic principles here, but to me there is something improper in building an instrument that can sound like an organ, horn, harpsichord, guitar, and violin as well as a piano, and then going things at the factory to prevent, forbid, thwart and frustrate the owner who might want to get non-piano sounds out of the thing he has, after all, bought and paid for.
I almost want to call this a moral issue. From a selfish viewpoint, I am a composer and want both pianistic and non-pianistic tones out of such an instrument freely available to whoever plays it.
Maybe one will have to resort to subterfuge: call the thing an electronic organ and surreptitously mention that it has percussion effects. I guess that's what's really happening. The first such instruments, like the Novachord of fond memory are not touch-sensitive, but when this becomes economically practicable, they will become so.
Some people will say that the organ is ousting the piano. But it has to become considerably unlike its ancestor the pipe-organ to do this, so several kinds of hidebound reactionary traditionalists will be against it.
Well, we've covered a terrific lot of territory--in the time-dimension, too. Let's see: what have I neglected? Oh yes! The keyboard. Shared with organ, celesta, accordion, clavichord, harpsichord, and some other instruments; but everybody thinks piano when they see a keyboard with seven white keys and five black keys in alternate groups of three and two, per octave.
The European concert pianists who unbeknownst sparked my writing this treatist, was just going to curve the keyboard and prolong it a little. She wasn't going to alter its basic pattern, nor was Clutsam who had nearly the same idea some years before her.
Now, how about it? Shall we improve the keyboard? What might we do that would be worthwhile? What is possible? What has been tried?
I could write a whole book about that subject. I'll have to beg your indulgence and skim through. Personally, I have pounded millions of piano, organ, clavichord, and typewriter kys in some 40 years. I have small hands and would prefer a much narrower piano keyboard. Organ keyboard too. Some years ago I actually went to a school workshop and sawed out oodles of such narrow organ keys. Maybe someday I'll make them up into keyboards. Why should I be debarred from playing tenths and elevtnhs just because my hands are smaller than some other people's? Is this fair? Well, one reason for the standard keyboard-widths is the mechanism of the piano. If the keys were much narrower they would be flimsy and so would the action-parts.
If you look inside a piano and see how closely the tuning-pins and strings are crammed together, and how little clearance there is between adjacent hammers and dampers, it will be obvious enough that a narrower keyboard is not too practical. Accordion players have the best of it: they have a much narrower keyboard, such that the outside distance from C to B on the piano keyboard (i.e., measuring from the crack between B and C to the crack between C and C in the next higher octave) would almost take in two more white keys on the accordion keyboard (from the crack between B and C to a point 3/4 of the way across D in the next higher octave).
Some reed-organs have keyboard a few hairbreadths narrower than normal, but pipe organ generally conform rigidly to piano keyboard widths, as do nearly all electronic organs. If you say anything, the music educators drag in the history of the keyboard: on ancient organs, the keys were sliders and then levers that had to be beaten with the fists; they were very wide, about as much so as pedal keys on an organ are today, or wider still.
Now that we have electronic organs, there is no limit to how narrow the keys could be: they could be made to fit a baby's or even a doll's fingers if you wanted to. Take a hint from the typewriter keyboard: people have to have very large hands before they complain about typewriter keys being too small.
There's a real "believe it or not:" There are 34 keys on the stnadard typewriter keyboard within the same space as there are 12 keys (seven white keys, one octave) on the piano keyboard! That's almost three times as many keys, and I can play a typewriter much faster than I can a piano.
Did anybody ever do anything about this? Yes, they tried, and one effort almost caught on: the Janko keyboard, arranged in tiers rather like a linotype keyboard, and with duplications so that the same note could be struck from different positions. A number of pianos were made with it; I have seen one, wuite a while ago. There was so much opposition to overcome that those who would have benefitted most by using it were the most prejudiced against its very real merits. The Janko keyboard was patented in 1882! That's right: 83 years ago! Why is such information suppressed?
Now we come to a hornet's nest of controversy. Don't bother looking it up now, but way back there several places in this article I mentioned an affair that I called `the 12-tone equally-tempered scale.' Of course you've heard of it, and you probably have heard little else but instruments that were supposedly tuned to it. Before we can sum up the pros and cons about improving the piano, we must consider seriously how the piano is tuned and why.
Theoretically, pianos (and organs and xylophones and accordions and zithers and glockenspiels and guitars) are tuned with twleve notes in each octave, the interval or distance between any two adjacent notes being the same (corresponding to a 6% increase in frequency, or a ratio of 1:12th root of 2). As a mathematical consideration of this involves roots and logarithms and fractions and exponents, I had better not go too far into this here.
Analogies and hints might be better. Compare the type-face being used here, or that used on an ordinary typewriter made some years ago, with the same letters in regular printer's type in your newspaper, magazine, or book. Notice that the capital letters here are more cramped than they are in the regular book. The letters m and w are cramped here, but spread out to their proper width there. The letter I is too wide here, really narrow there, and so on. This type-face, then, is equally-tempered, in a sense. Every letter has been distorted a la Procrustes, to make all letters the same width. On the piano, all semitone intervals are distorted to make them the same width. Besides that, the octaves are stretched a little at either end of the keyboard, to make the treble more brilliant and to make the bass a little better-sounding than it would be if it had perfect octaves like some organ stops.
Three perfectly-tuned major thirds do not add up to an octave, and B# is not the same note as C. But ont he piano we pretend that three major thirds are the very same as an octave, and that B" and C are two names for the same pitch. Twelve fifths (C->>D->>D ->>A ->> and so on up to B#) are not exactly seven octaves, but a trifle more, about a quarter of a semitone,so that the two B#s are farther form one another than either is from the starting-point C...making the question `Is C sharper or flatter than B# in untempered intonation?' quite pointless unless you specify how you got to the enharmonic note. The same goes, of course, for Dbb and C, for F# and Gb and all the other so-called neharmonic pairs. Thus the problem of building a keyboard instrument for more than 12 notes to the octave is not merely a matter of separating C# from Db and so on, though it would usually include this distinction.
Can we improve an ordinary piano by tuning some other way than "normal"? It depends on what kind of music you are going to play. Go back to the 17th century and youwill find a very large musical literature conveived in the meantone temperament, and even in the 18th centurya nd later there is a great deal of music that will sound much better on an instrument so tuned. On such an instrument, you will hear real major thirds, not the imitations ones we are used to. The catch is that with only 12 tones ot the octave, as on a piano keyboard, if you have G# you cannot have Ab or vice-versa. So if you beyong a narrow range of keys, harsh dissonances appear. The experiment is well worth making. Many well-known church hymns gain by being played in meantone temperament.
If you are more adventurous you can try a piano tuned to just intonation, a completely untempered scale, but you will be restricted to one key and a few chords form its closest neighbors. Actually, for the reasons already set out in detail, the piano is not the instrument to try just intonation, for it can never be in perfect tune with itself. With eletronic organs becoming more plentiful, they are the logical instruments for that particular experiment.
There are compromise tunings, and the opinion is growing that what J.S. bach meant by well-tempered was not necessarily the equal twelve-tone temperament we strive for today, but a compromise in which the nearer keys were smoother and the remote keys rougher, but all keys were usable. Whether this be true in the case of Back or no, it definitely was true in the case of enough composers and performers on keyboard instruments to make the tuning of and listening to such temperaments worth the trouble.
Then there is the matter of stretched octaves already mentioned. Some people, especially concertol pianists and players of the brilliant, showy piano pieces, like their octaves stretched more than usual. The Top C often reaches C# or nearly so! Conversely, those who must play their piano with an organ have to forgo most of the normal stretching, so the piano won't make quarrelsome discords with the organ. The theoretical equal temperament does not tamper with the octave, so you cannot say that pianos are ordinarily tuned in an absolutely equal temperament.
This fact has brought sorrow and worry to the tuneers who own newfangled electronic tuning aids, for the precise equal temperament does not give a satisfactory result at the upper and lower extremities of the piano keyboard.
Now that I've brought up this touchy subject and annoyed some people, might as well be hanged for sheep as a lamb. People who have invested a lot of money in a piano won't like to be told that pianos are imperfect (like all other human creations), that they continually go out of tune,and that they are out of tune with themselves. Singers usually conform to the piano's tuning, whether that tuning be good, bad, indifferent,lousy, or atrocious. So do violinsts and other instrumentalists, even whole orcehstras and bands. This has given pianists a false confidence, a notion that their chosen instrument is entitled to the be monitor and standard of tuning for every other instrument, which it unfortunately is in fact.
I better interrupt myself for amoment and state that I am not trying to change the way the average piano is tuned today, because this is a perfectly authentic way to have it tuned for playing Schubert and Schumann adn Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and Debussy and others I haven't room ot mention, down to Hindemith and Satie and Schonberg and Ravel and others. Merely, I am raising the questions that have gone unanswered for over a century, and about which so much misinformation has been spread that the situation cries out for adjustment.
We don't have to change the tuning for the music written in the Romantic period, when the piano was at its zenith, nor for the `rational' school (usually credited to Schoenberg as Arch-Atonlist) nor for the `12-tone serialism' descended form this, nor for music based upon the `whole-tone scale' perfected by Debussy. These works were conceived for a twelve-tone equal temperament, so we can safely assume that such was what the composers wanted.
Now that I have paid my respects and homage to composers dead and living, on to some more questions: would the piano be improved by giving it more than twelve tones in each octave? (Cries of "heretic"! in the background as the Witch-Hunt gathers momentum.) Let's `distinguish,' as the Scholastic Philosophers say. That question just asked conceals other questions, so if we're not careful, we can get into a fruitless argument.
Would music progress if we are allowed to use more than 12 tones in the ocatave? There, I've flushed out Concealed Question No. 1. My answer, based on actual composing, is Yes. Has the piano had anything to do with the contemporary devotion ot the 12-tone equal temperament? The answer is again Yes. Concealed Question No. 2 is now out in the open.
I hope these issues are now separated in your mind. Now, let's ask: would the Piano be improved by giving it more than 12 tones per octave? My answer now has to be: With the possible excpetion of 19 tones, the piano is not congenial to more than 12. For this reason, it is my contentionthat the piano, in 1965, is thwarting the progress of musical composition. This was not so in 1880 or even 1910. In certain senses, the combinations possible withint he 12-tone system are becomign exhausted. This has forced the development of serial dodecaphony (atonality). Lately the serialists are getting to sound too much alike. If you write serially, you must avoid the cliches of ordinary tonal writing, and this makes everything so forced, strained, contrived and delibearte, that inspiration flies out the window...and modern psychologists hate inspiration anyway. Also, the atonal writer gives up the contrast between consonance and dissonance available to the tonal writer.
How shall we get out of this fix? Prepared pianos? Tape-manipulations? These may be palliatives, if not cures. I'm not taking this direction, but that doesn't mean I disapprove of toher ocmposers doing it if it appeals to them.
But another way has been tried. Alois Haba in Czechoslovakia and Ivan Vyshnegradsky in France have used pianos in the quartertone system. So has Mildred Couper in this country; and many others. Haba, as well as Hans Barth, had special quartertone pianos constructed; whereas Couper and Vyshnegradsky used two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. On several occasions I have gone into large music stores, and wandered around till I found two old pianos accidentally nearly a quartertone apart, and tried to play both of them at once. The result usually was rather disappointing.
Quartertone piano records exist, and every so often someone achieves at least temporary publicity via the quartertone-piano route. This scheme keeps on being tried because it is so obvious and because it does not involve disturbing the present 12-tone system, which it contains twice over. But it isn't Setting the World On Fire. Why not?
Primarily, I would say because the piano's quality of tone has been deliberately altered in favor of the 12-tone equal system. The 24-tone equal temperament (quartertones) provides far better imitations of the 7th and 11th harmonics than the 12-tone system does; but if you insit on using a special piano or two ordinary pianos for quartertones, you are trying to get 7th and 11th overtones out of an instrument carefully designed to eliminate them! (Remember that bit about hte hammer striking the string at one-seventh the length? Purpose, to improve the major sixth by getting rid of the seventh harmonic, which is a decidely-flattened minor seventh, and thus a very close neihgbor of the major sixth.) Quartertones would sound much better on a harpsichord, clavichord, or organ--pipe or electronic. Quartertones do not improve the piano. That is neither an argument against quartertones, no against pianos. Just a statement of incompatibility.
Secondly, because quartertones are not the only way to escape 12-tone monotony; nor would they be the first step beyond twelve tones per octave. Before you get to 24 tones, you pass through 17, 19 and 22 tones, all of which are possibilities.
Quartertones are better suited to such instruments as the viooncello adn the trombone, rather than the piano. The tendency on the piano would be toward a twinned or bi-atonality, and toward such affairs as the 8-tone scale (rather like the whole-tone 5-tone scale) you get by taking 3/4 tone at a time.
The 17-tone system again is primarily melodic, but the atonalists should at least give it a passing glance. A 17-tone piano could be built.
Now for the 19-tone system. This has been explored. Many libraries in this country have Joseph Yasser's book, A Theory of Evolving Tonality, which came out in 1932, and presents eloquent arguments for the 19-tone sytem, stressing that the 12-tone scale as now used for serialism can be considered a supra-diatonic scale if 7 new notes are inserted to function witn it as chromatics, in the way the 5 black keys now function with the 7 white keys to make 12 notes. But the elaborate charts and the preposterous ten-line staff and new names for notes such as Vb or Wb, would scare away eventhe adventurous souls who might ardinarily experiment with such a tuning.
Fortunately, other people have written about this system, and in Europe several books and pamphlets were published about it. The conventional musical notation can be used, calling C# and Db different notes, but assigning the same pitch tot he new enharmonic pair E# and Fb, which note of course would come between E and F. All 12-tone music can be played on a 19-tone instrument, but the results will vary fromexcellent to strange to queer to intolerable, depending on the period and style of the music.
Recently, I had the opportunity to read a Thesis by M. Joel Mandelbaum, Ph.D., which deals mainly with the 19-tone system and with other proposed and actually-used tuning systems. Unfortunately, this book has not yet been published for general distribution. We hope it will be. It can be obtained through University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is in a few libraries. The reason I just said Unfortunately is that another scholarly and informative book, On Tuning and Temperament, by J. Murray Barbour, was published, but it is so dreadfully pessimistic about going beyond 12 tones that too many people have been discouraged and have had all their enthusiasm for experimenting taken away by this book. They have been led to reject the idea sight unseen and sound unheard. Fortunatley, Mandelbaum did not give up so easily, and he tuned two pianos to the 19-tone system, which meant that the two keyboards shared 5 tones in common. Recordings exist of compositions played this way, and as the 19-tone system doesn't go in for such exotic affairs as 7th and 11th overtones, but does possess wonderful minor thirds and major sixths, these compositions prove that the 19-tone system can be applied tothe piano with its present tone-quality.
Fait accompli!---no one can say it's impossible when it has been done, and the compositions have such energy, vitality and drive. The only begaboo is the conomic problem: it is just possible to construct pianos inthe 19-tone scale, and this would mean progress, and in terms of piano tone and technique it is as much logical evolution as revolution--and existing stocks of printed sheet-music would not be rendered obsolete. However, think of the staggering cost of re-tooling piano factories, of retraining tuners (but the 19-tone system is much easier to tune thatn the 12)--and rewriting textbooks (though even with a new keyboard the same old finger-exercises will work very well. Think fo the millions of dollars