Instrumentation Alteration

The world is changing, ever evolving. As new inventions are constantly being created, existing ones must be retrofitted to fit today’s standards. Instruments are no exception. They too have been altered to fit a rapidly evolving concert scene. Since most of these innovations had already occurred in the 19th century, this post will instead look at the 20th. What innovations, you ask? Let’s find out.   

So far the pieces we listened to have been pleasing, if not lyrical. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed listening to them and learning what they had to teach me. However, some of this week’s pieces changed all that, and not for the better. Don’t get me wrong: most of these pieces were very well done and intriguing. Harry Partch’s Eight Hitchhiker’s Inscriptions is a fun tune which recounts life during the Depression, and Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 4 (Amazing Grace) is a work of sheer beauty that I could listen to forever.

And then there’s Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano.

When I first listened to this, I literally thought to myself: What the Hell am I listening to? It was a mess! It was street noise! It was a conglomerate of all the nation’s dump heaps piled up on a poor man’s excuse of a Gossamer wing! It was a muddled mishmash of everything and the kitchen sink!

Okay, you probably knew where I was going with that. I literally questioned whether or not I was going insane. It was music better suited for a video game than the piano. And yet, there is a subtle brilliance in this music that I had not realized until further investigation. For you see, this piece has dynamics, crescendos, actual feeling. By means of contrast, here’s the typical chanson du jour one could expect to find during the Player Piano’s hayday:

Not much in the way of variety, isn’t there? This was made possible by Conlon Nancarrow’s engineering skills. In 1939, he discovered the Player Piano after reading John Cowell’s New Musical Resources, intrigued in its ability to play rhythms at speeds which far exceeded human abilities. Additionally, in 1947, he tinkered with the Piano’s mechanisms which resulted in the aforementioned variations in dynamics. Both and more are present in the Studies, and though the Player Piano still clearly retains its mechanical sound, it is regardless a vast improvement.

Though I still stand by my assertions that they are a bunch of random notes, the Studies for Player Piano is still, in my mind, a technological marvel. And they say Mexicans are only good for stealing our jobs and crossing our borders.

Now, let’s talk about Harry Partch.

Harry Partch was an interesting man, and not just because he sounded like Maurice LaMarche’s Orson Welles impersonation. He was a firm believer in Corporealism, the, in the words of his former apprentice, Ben Johnson, “...a vehement protest against what he considered the negation of the body and the bodily in our society”. He believed that music shouldn’t be separated from words or visual action, that people should be seen actually doing something (much to the annoyance of the choreographers he worked with, but that’s another subject entirely). Consequently, many of the instruments he created fit that philosophy. Many of them can be found in the documentary film he made demonstrating these instruments, but I wish to focus on his “Chromolodeon”, “...an adapted reed organ” (begins at 3:01):

As you can hear, It feels less like an organ and more like a speeding up sound file, for lack of a better term. That’s because they use Microtones. Microtones are notes not normally found in the traditional chromatic scale. They result in intervals of less than one semitone when paired with the aforementioned traditional notes. They result in more freedoms for performers, more in the way of harmonic variety for composers, and general unending annoyance for those who have perfect pitch. They date as far back as Ancient Greece which, for lack of a better link, was something Harry Partch studied extensively. And just to further compound his knowledge of Antiquity, at 3:28 and 3:38 in the above video, he demonstrates two different Ancient Greek scales.Additionally, other instruments, like his family of Katharas, take their origins in Ancient Greek tradition.

And as a percussionist, I’d be doing a great disservice to myself if I did not go over his Percussion instruments. The two that stand out to me are his Bass Marimba, because of its spine-tingling resonance that only a note so low could produce, and his Diamond Marimba, because of the ability to perform chords in one fell swoop. But the ingenuity of all his Percussion instruments are still very welcome additions to the family.

To conclude this hastily constructed post, everything will be adapted, changed to fit either the demands of the general public or those of the inventor. Musical instruments are no exception. Though some may exist for the needs of a single composer and others for the future of music making in general, these adaptations serve to deepen the interest of music. I think it would serve us all good for some experimentation. But we’d best not go too far or else we’ll get something that looks like this:

and that doesn't look very practical, doesn't it?