PROGRAM NOTES
IVOR DARREG - LECTURE-DEMONSTRATION IN LOS ANGELES, 1989
Xenharmonic (adj.): Pertaining to music which sounds unlike that composed in the familiar 12 tone equal-tempered scale. – I. Darreg
Ivor Darreg periodically got invitations to do a lecture on his music and instrument-building. Sometimes the lecture invitations involved his megalyra and kosmolyra instruments - his best-known instruments, courtesy of the many art show exhibitions in which they got featured. After their invention in 1975, the megalyra and kosmolyra proved a hit on the art gallery circuit because of their bright colors and colored fretlines, and also because, when plugged in, they could be strummed and played to produce exotic pitches and chords, something other visual sculptures didn't offer.
Ivor also gave general lectures on semantics and his numaudo and numalittera systems, a now-obsolete method of rapidly speaking numbers and equations aloud. The internet has made such techniques superfluous today, but back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a real need for a method of transmitting equations or numbers rapidly by phone or by shortwave radio, or on an audio recording.
Ivor's interest in semantics and phonetics dates from 1936, when he had to have all his teeth pulled because of a tooth infection (this was the era before modern antibiotics, remember!). Ivor had to learn how to pronounce words all over again because of the loss of his teeth, and this sparked a lifelong interest in phonetics.
By the 1970's, Ivor began to give lectures showcasing a wide range of the different xenharmonic tunings. Ivor would typically play pieces like his Prelude Number One for 19 tone guitar or his Prelude Number one for 31 tone guitar. To show the emotional and musical effect of different tunings, Ivor would then play the same piece in different tunings to show how it changed.
By the 1980s, Ivor had enough synthesizers and refretted guitars that he could showcase many different musical tunings in a single lecture. No one else was doing this at the time, and to this day, no one seems to cover all the bases this way in a live lecture.
ABOUT THIS LECTURE
Ivor built a megalyra for a member of a rock group, and as a result he got an invitation to speak at his gathering in Eagle Rock in Los Angeles in 1989. Ivor's use of various different refretted guitars and a selection of his synthesizers proves typical of Ivor's lecture-demonstrations. Routines like "How to Translate Greek Into Japanese" come from fliers Ivor released in the 1970s, which in turn arose from compositions Ivor produced on his Electing Tuning Organ in the 1960s. That particular riff is based on Ivor's piece On the Enharmonic Tetrachord for Elastic Tuning Organ in 22 tone equal in 1966.
Many of the short musical pieces Ivor plays during this lecture-demonstration involve modifications or excerpts of compositions he produced years earlier. Ivor returns to various themes like the melody from Purple Bedroom Blues and Lullaby For A Baby Computer over and over again, modifying them or playing them in tunings different from the original tunin (19 in the case of Purple Bedroom Blues, 17 in the case of Lullaby).
TRANSFER
Ivor called the process of playing one composition in several different tunings "transfer". Ivor often did this with his compositions, and sometimes designed the same piece so that it could be played effectively in a variety of tunings - Prelude Number Two for 19 Tone GUitar, for example, can effectively be played in 17, 19, or 31 equal.
As he pointed out, this process of transfer can't be used indiscriminately. Playing a composition originally written in 12 equal in some other tuning often produces disastrous results, because the composer typically relies on features of conventional Western tuning (like the presence of a recognizable semitone, or a chord progression that divides the whole tone into two equal parts, or the presence of recognizable functions perfect fifths, or smooth major thirds) which may not exist in other xenharmonic tuning.
Ivor took great care in composing pieces intended to get played in more than one different tuning. The unique effect of transfer remains a resource relatively unexplored in microtonal music. Ivor pioneered it, and it's one of the real thrills of these lectures to hear him play the same piece in several different tunings successively.
---Notes by McLaren