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PROGRAM NOTES
IVOR DARREG – A TOUR OF HIS STUDIO
Xenharmonic (adj.): Pertaining to music which sounds unlike that composed in the familiar 12 tone equal-tempered scale. – I. Darreg
Ivor Darreg was born in 1917 in Seattle and lived there until age 15. He took 'cello lessons as a teenager and became interested in exploring pitches outside the conventional 12 tones of the Western scale. He 'cello teacher didn't approve and that was the end of that — the end of that teacher services, not of Ivor's musical explorations.
By the 1960s Ivor had settled down in Los Angeles, which then offered relatively affordable housing. Ivor made a modest living as a piano tuner __in those days, pianos cost little enough that the average person could afford one, so Ivor got plenty of work as a piano tuner.
As a self-taught electronics engineer, Ivor learned to build electronic circuits by studying schematic diagrams in the early radio magazines of the day. Back in the 1930s, electronic devices were new enough and sufficiently expensive that hobbyists often preferred to build their own radios or other devices. Ivor's earliest electronic instruments, the electronic keyboard oboe, came from a diagram of a telegraph oscillator circuit in a radio magazine. The circuit was simple and efficient, using a blocking oscillator with a single tube. The oscillator consisted of a simple RC circuit that fed current into a capacitor, which then discharged it periodically, generating a periodic waveform. The pitch of the waveform changes with the value of the resistor - so if you inserted a tunable potentiometer, you could tube the frequency of the oscillator circuit. Ivor used a set of fixed resistors to produce pitches for the keyboard oboe, while he inserted potentiometers in each note's circuit for the Elastic Tuning Organ so that each note could be tuned up or down. With 60 fully tunable oscillators, the electric keyboard oboe offered unprecedented versatility. Not until the much more expensive far more complex Scalatron keyboard synthesizer appeared in the late 1960s did any synthesizer offer the kind of retunability Ivor's homebuilt Elastic Tuning Organ had.
LOS ANGELES REAL ESTATE HELL
Ivor and his mother initially owned a house. It was essentially stolen from Ivor for back property taxes by the City of Los Angeles after his mother died, and Ivor found himself forced to move to a set of increasingly smaller apartments as the Los Angeles real estate market heated up in the 1970s and eventually went completely insane in the 1980s. This had tragic consequences for Ivor's instrument collection.
Initially Ivor had kept his amplifying clavichord in his house. When the house got sold out from under him for back property taxes, Ivor had to move the amplifying clavichord (a grand piano frame revamped with clavichord innards and magnetic amplifying pickups for each note) to another house owned by a friend. That house got sold and the clavichord got unceremoniously dumped into an empty lot full of.
REEL TO REEL RECORDING
Ivor used reel to reel recorders in the 1980S and in 1990 when this video recording made because it was the best choice for someone on a budget. For critical recordings Ivor used reels, and for demonstrations and lectures Ivor used cassettes. Today digital audio recording technology has advanced to the point where USB recorders cost less than $100, but back in 1990, the only available digital recording unit’s costs thousands of dollars and required an even more expensive desktop computer with astronomically overpriced hard drives. (For comparison, in 1987 the Mac II with a 68020 processor and 8 megabytes of RAM and a 40 megabyte hard drive, had a list price of $4700.) In 1990 a gigabyte hard drive cost thousands upon thousands of dollars, and would only hold a hundred minutes of audio. A reel recorder, by comparison, cost a few hundred dollars -- or even less, if bought used - and each tape reel cost only a few dollars and held up to 90 minutes of audio on both sides.
OBSOLETISMO - THE VIRTUE OF ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY
Ivor's use of obsolete analog technology in instruments like his kosmolyrai and his Elastic Tuning Organ and his electric keyboard drum paradoxically let him do things that people still can't do today with digital "synthesizers. Ivor's Elastic Tuning Organ uses blocking oscillator circuits, which prove vulnerable to the parasitic capacitance that arises from the inevitable residual capacitive impedance of wires and grounding circuits. This small residual capacitance produced a unique effect in Ivor's organ: when played, the chords slowly start to move toward just ratios. So chords and other intervals played on the Elastic Tuning Organ in, say, 17 or 19 equal or 22 equal, if held, will gradually and subtly move toward just intonation values. This is a unique musical effect not available on any current digital synthesizer.
Likewise, the analog circuitry produces a subtly different tone-color for each note of Ivor's organ, and the non-quite-periodically repeating blocking oscillator circuits tend to phase over time, producing a warm and vibrant effect wholly unlike the cold dead sound of so many digital synthesizers.
Likewise, Ivor's kosmolyra instruments with their set of many different strings tuned to a just or other series of xenharmonic pitches allowed arpeggios in multiple different tuning systems by playing different sides of the kosmolyra at once. Ivor also used a slide to produce chords of just ratios moving by exotic root intervals, another effect not easy to obtain on digital synthesizers. So by moving backwards in technology, Ivor paradoxically leaped ahead with new musical capabilities that digital technology didn't allow.
ABOUT IVOR DARREG (1917-1994)
Ivor Darreg (b 1917) invented his first electronic instrument (the electronic keyboard oboe) in 1936, at age 19. He has been building electronic and acoustic instruments and exploring microtonal scales for more than 50 years, and is widely regarded as one of the leading microtonal composers and theoreticians in the United States. His informal newsletter The Xenharmonic Bulletin has inspired offshoots as diverse as John H. Chalmers Jr.'s XENHARMONIKON and PITCH, the Journal for International Microtonalists weeds. Ivor only found out about this after a year, by which time the amplifying clavichord had been ruined by exposure to the rain and elements.
In 1984, Ivor's apartment got sold and the owner gave Ivor only 24 hours to move all his belongings out. Jonathan Glasier drove down to Los Angeles and helped Ivor move to a house he provided, but in the process of the frantic move Ivor's Elastic Tuning Organ with its 60 vacuum tube oscillators got wrecked. 60 fragile vacuum tubes can't survive getting hauled into a pickup truck bed and slammed around over bumpy roads during a last-minute forced move.
JONATHAN GLASIER TO THE RESCUE
Jonathan Glasiser (who had worked as a member of Harry Partch's ensemble during the 1960s at UCSD) came to Ivor's rescue and provided not only a stable secure house to live in, but also a great deal of personal and financial assistance. After 1984, Ivor's production of lecture-demonstration tapes and instrument demos greatly increased, largely because Jonathan gave Ivor the time and peace to get back to making music.
This studio is part of the house Jonathan provided for Ivor on Polk Street in San Diego. Ivor used the entire front living room and most the backyard and garage for his instruments. By the time of this video, in 1990, Ivor no longer had his wrecked Elastic Tuning Organ or his amplifying clavichord, but did still have his Electronic Keyboard Oboe from 1936, his Electric Keyboard Drum from 1949, his Theremin built in the 1950s, and he also had other instruments given or loaned to Ivor by friends. Ivor had a two manual farfisa electronic organ which could be retuned to get up to 24 pitches per octave (just on equal) between both keyboards. Ivor also had a DX7ll which could be retuned to any tuning system, a Mirage synthesizer with Dick Lord's alternative operating system that could be retuned to a wide variety of tunings, and a Korg Polysix pre-MIDI analog synthesizer modified so that a knob changed the number of volts per octave and let the instrument go into any desired equal division of the octave. Ivor had a JX3P digitally controlled analog synthesizer locked into 12 which he used for demonstrations of conventional Western tuning and melodies and chords.
Ivor hung his many refretted guitars on the wall, though his original 31 tone electric guitar got stolen in the 1970s.
DIGITAL OR ANALOG?
Ivor mainly used analog electronic instruments, with the addition a few digital instruments like the DX7II (1986) and the Mirage (1985). Ivor never got into computers because the tremendous cost of early computers combined with the rapidity with which they went out of date and became obsolete made them a bad investment of his time. As Ivor pointed out to me, taking years to learn the operating system of something like the Commodore 64 or the Tandy TRS-1 made little sense when those computers had already become obsolete by 1990. As a result, Ivor did his recordings with analog cassette technology and didn't use MIDI in his recordings. Until the mid-1980s, Ivor used a Verity per, a peculiar typewriter variant with a wide range of excellent fonts that produced typed output much like a typeset magazine.
Unfortunately, the Varityper become obsolete, and without repair facilities it eventually fell apart and Ivor found himself forced to use a regular typewriter.
At this time, in the late 1980s and very early 1990s, laser printers still cost a tremendous amount of money, upwards of $3000 for an Apple Postscript laser printer (down from the initial stratospheric $7000 when Apple introduced the first Postscript laser printer in 1985). This kind of sky-high cost typified all the early digital technology of the 1980s -- thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars for an 8-bit computer running at 5 Mhz with 640 kilobytes of RAM, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars machines for digital synthesizers (the DX7II cost $2000) and even more for digital audio recorders. The first DAT machine introduced during the late 1980s proved so expensive, at $5000 each that companies advertised a flight to Japan and a night's stay in a premium Tokyo hotel with a deluxe dinner at a high-end Japanese restaurant plus a shopping trip for a DAT recorder - and the price still came in at less than the cost of the available DAT recorders in the U.S. at that time.
---Notes by McLaren
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