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ABOUT THE RECORDINGS
Tracks 1-3: In 1946 Ivor finished building the amplified clavichord. Using a custom-welded 8-foot surplus WVV II steel frame and a salvaged piano keyboard, the amplifying clavichord produces truly awesome deep bass. The longest strings measured 7 feet, and each piano string (struck by a home-built tangent) featured its own hand-wound magnetic pickup. One of the most impressive features of the amplifying clavichord is its capacity to bend the pitch of individual notes. Unlike the piano, clavichords can exert a varying and continuous pressure on their strings because the tangent presses directly and constantly against the string. This allows pitch-bending of individual notes in real time, and you'll hear some bent non-12 clavichord pitches here. Also notable: bebung, or vibrato, produced by gently wobbling the piano keys after Ivor hits and holds down the clavichord notes. Ivor made these recordings in 1957 on a borrowed 7.5 ips reel recorder.
Tracks 4-9: In 1981 Ivor Darreg compiled an "Introduction" reel containing excerpts of his microtonal music and instruments for Jonathan Glasier. The spoken intros from the copy reel have been excerpted and the original reel recordings of the compositions edited in. Ivor made most of these recordings in 1965. Track 4 is a recording of Ivor playing the megalyra in 1976. Track 5 contains a unique collaboration composition. Ivor hand-notated a copy of his 1942 "Prelude in D Major' for organ with microtonal just intonation variants of the original 12-equal notes and supervised Dave Hill, who entered the pitches of the composition into his home-built microtonal digital synthesizer in 1981. This recording was made with Ivor's specific approval and oversight, and showcases a lesser-known property of Ivor's compositions: many were designed to be heard in more than one tuning. (Examples include: Lullaby.
For A Baby Computer, suitable for 17 or 34 tone, certain Excursions in the. Enharmonic suitable for 22 or 24 tone, etc., and his Prelude Number 1 for 31-tone guitar, which Ivor performed in both 31 and 19 equal on occasion.) Tracks 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are 1965 recordings of Ivor performing various compositions on his unique elastic tuning organ. This organ was hand-built in.
1962-1963 and featured 60 separate vacuum-tube oscillators--1 for each note. Due to this design, the elastic tuning organ is tunable to any just or equal-tempered system. Examples of both types of tunings are recorded here.
Track 10: This 19-tone improvisation was recorded on John McBryde's DX7Il in 1991.
Tracks 11-12: In 1967 Edward Kneifel gave Ivor a commission to produce the stage music for the play In Limbo. Ivor created a panoply of microtonal music, most of it performed on his unique home-built instruments--the modified theremin with volume keyboard, the electric keyboard drum (telephone relay switching circuits as drum machines!), and the elastic tuning organ. Track 11 uses Ivor's unique organ, an instrument which retuned chords towards just intonation by the interaction of its 60 vacuum-tube-based blocking oscillators. Ivor built the elastic tuning organ with scrounged TV tubes and radio tubes and mounted it in a scavenged aluminum aircraft control panel...truly music "on a broken shoestring." You don't need bucks if you've got genius. This piece uses a tuning of 31 equal tones per octave. Track 12 is the Theremin part for In Limbo. Ivor built the Theremin by hand too, out of scrounged parts. Unlike most Theremins, Ivor's version features a keyboard to control volume.
Track 13: In 1970, Ivor tore apart the amplifying clavichord and removed its piano keys to re-wire all 88 individual magnetic pickups. In the process, he decided to retune the strings to the harmonic series and use it temporarily as a psaltery--thus the name "megapsalterion." Recorded 4 September 1970.
Track 14: A version of A. J. Ellis's "harmonical" tuning is here heard on Ivor's elastic tuning organ. (Each of 60 tube oscillators could be tuned individually. Ellis was the translator of Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone, an English musician and music theorist who lived during the late 19th century.) The prominent just 7/4 is worthy of note (all puns intended) because of its unusual smoothness compared with the conventional Western minor seventh. Ivor made this recording in 1965.
Track 15: This excerpt from Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously dates from 1972. It features Ivor multitracked with himself on 22-tone refretted guitar and his Kosmolyra instrument, a small four-sided member of the megalyra family with four sets of just-tuned magnetically amplified guitar strings.
---Notes by McLaren
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