I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music

I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music

An American history of instrument building

Written By

Nicole V. Gagne



Nicole V. Gagné playing her Attis-Viol
Photo by Cathryn Platine

The term “built environment” is ordinarily used to distinguish the terrains of houses and buildings from the landscapes of the natural environment. When used to discuss music, it directs attention straight to the composer/musicians who make their own instruments. The American penchant for instrument building is essentially a 20th-century phenomenon—in part because the relative newness of so many instruments in the 18th and 19th centuries itself provided a certain spirit of original construction. Yet glimmers of the tradition become discernable later in the 19th century. In 1874, Elisha Gray patented the “Musical Telegraph,” a one-octave keyboard controlling electromagnetic tones. Charles Ives described somewhat ruefully how his father George had “rigged up a contrivance to stretch 24 or more violin strings and tuned them up to suit the dictates of his own curiosity. […] He started to apply a system of bows to be released by weights, which would sustain the chords, but in this process he was suppressed by the family and a few of the neighbors.” Not all the innovations came from the fringe, however. John Philip Sousa recalled conducting the United States Marine Band in the 1890s, when his ensemble employed “a B-Bb bass tuba of circular form known as a ‘Helicon.’ It was all right enough for street-parade work, but its tone was apt to shoot ahead too prominently and explosively to suit me for concert performances.” He consulted the Philadelphia instrument manufacturer J.W. Pepper about “constructing a bass instrument in which the bell would turn upwards and be adjustable for concert purposes. He built one and, grateful to me for the suggestion, called it a Sousaphone.” And the beloved brass boomer has been with us ever since.

The history of American instrument building has many pathways. It involves instances of what might be called an aesthetic of instrument building—American composer-musicians (inevitably the same person) becoming inventor-builders (ditto!) in order to articulate a music which they can’t hear on available instruments. It also includes a wide range of music played on non-instruments, from unusual percussion arsenals to the devotees of recycled and found materials, as well as radical reconsiderations of traditional instruments: preparations, new performance techniques, retuning. Another key ingredient in many of these new instruments has been electricity.

Harry Partch‘s shadow looms larger than ever almost 30 years after his death, and his works continue to be performed on his own instruments (or replicas). His example motivates and inspires others, judging from the DIY music makers who have proliferated in the last three decades. Partch proved that it’s worth the effort, that other people do want to hear music made with its own instruments and tuning. A strict diet of music as it is taught, manufactured, and sold in the United States is bad for you—there are special nutrients in music that comes directly from its maker/player, unmediated by the marketplace.

Partch became an instrument builder in search of a sound: a just-intonation, 43-note-to-the-octave tuning system, put to work for what he termed “corporeal” music: “the essentially vocal and verbal music of the individual.” By the early 1930s he was playing his Adapted Viola, designed with a longer neck and played like a cello. Over the decades, Partch retuned a reed organ into his Chromelodeon, developed string instruments (Kithara, Harmonic Canon), and built an array of percussion, from various wooden marimbas to exotica such as the Cloud Chamber Bowls—sections of 16-inch-diameter, 12-gallon Pyrex carboys—or the Spoils of War, with its seven brass shell casings. He created these instruments as sculptural/dramatic presences for his music theatre works, such as U.S. Highball, Oedipus, The Bewitched, Revelation In The Courthouse Park, and Delusion Of The Fury.

An instrument gets built because that’s the only way the composer/musician can break through an impasse and realize a sound that she or he knows exists but hasn’t yet heard. Construction then becomes as vital as raft-building for someone on a deserted island. Former Partch assistant Dean Drummond summed up this special urgency: “I invented and built the zoomoozophone during 1978 because it was necessary for me to continue composing at the time.” Leader of the performing ensemble Newband, Drummond built his 31-tone-to-the-octave percussion instrument out of 129 aluminum tubes; it’s modular in design and can be played by one to four zoomoozophonists.

Ellen Fullman said it all when she commented that her Long String Instrument “sounds absolutely like nothing else.” Ninety strings of bronze harpsichord wire are stretched some 3 feet above the ground, 3/4 of an inch apart, and attached to a wooden resonator. The Long String Instrument is acoustic and takes the size of the space in which it’s assembled. Both the strings and the player’s hands are rosined, and one plays it by walking alongside it. Glenn Branca devised mallet guitars—three-tiered variations of guitar bodies, the strings hammered with drumstricks—for his Symphony No. 2, so he could work with a greater number of open strings. For his Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4, he designed a half-dozen keyboard instruments that pluck their strings like harpsichords. (One rubs the strings with rotating leather wheels.) He used pickups to amplify the partials from the vibrating strings and tuned the keyboards to the first 127 intervals of the harmonic series. Improvisations by Zeena Parkins have combined her traditional harps with a triangular custom instrument featuring multiple pickups and a vibrato bar. Elliott Sharp has created instruments he calls “slabs”: long blocks of wood with bass strings, a movable bridge, and contact mics. He has improvised on his “slabs” and composed music for a quartet of them in Larynx. Two other self-devised instruments from Sharp are the violinoid (a violin neck mounted on a solid wooden body with guitar tuners and pickups on either side of a metal bridge) and the pantar (a steel top from a storage drum fitted with tunin
g pegs for four strings, with a domed cymbal as a bridge and amplified with a contact mic).

The relative newness of the electric guitar, as well as its continuing innovations, have prompted more extreme instrument building. Emmett Chapman‘s “Chapman Stick” suggests a wide and lengthy guitar neck with ten strings and is designed to be played with both hands independent, tapping and holding the strings against the frets. Guitar-maker William Eaton has created instrument designs that meld the strings of a harp or lyre into guitar bodies. Inspired by the African kora, Bob Grawi has designed and built 24-string “Gravikords,” built of stainless steel and amplified with a pickup.

A charming grassroots string instrument worth remembering is the Dulceola, a unique keyboard-harp that was built by an itinerant artisan who also sold them from the back of his truck while traveling through the South in the 1920s. Its sound can still be heard in two sessions of gospel recordings, from 1927 and 1929, in which vocalist Washington Phillips accompanied himself on Dulceola.

The string will always sing, and thus has a never-ending appeal to instrument builders. Yet percussion making has maintained a certain preeminence in the field. When Moondog was a homeless street musician, he often performed on and recorded with percussion instruments he’d built and enjoyed an aspect of Partchian spectacle when he would wear his Viking-like garb while playing his “trimbas,” “yukh,” and “oo.” Composer Lucia Dlugoszewski turned to the sculptor Ralph Dorazio for the construction of over one hundred percussion instruments she’d designed. They’re featured in several of her major works and are the sole instrumentation for her Suchness Concert and Radical Quidditas For An Unborn Baby. They tapped into Dlugoszewski’s own kind of theatre too, and she would play them onstage as Erick Hawkins danced to Geography Of Noon.

Tom Nunn has specialized in improvising on his own experimental instruments, chiefly his many “space plates” (metal sheets with vertical brass rods that are bowed) and electro-acoustic percussion boards (wooden boards with amplified sound-producing items, such as combs and nails). Musician and instrument builder Grant Strombeck has created an array of witty and original percussion instruments using various media. Richard Cooke, along with having replicated the Old Granddad gamelan of Lou Harrison, built his own tuned-bar instruments, including his Free Notes: sets of individual bar-and-resonator units which can arranged in any sequence desired. Leslie Ross plays her instrument using foot pedals to blow air through rubber tubing and into numerous resonators: wood recorders, waste-pipe horns, scrap metal. The young composer Robert Macht was the first person to write scores for the one-of-a-kind percussion instruments invented by Gunnar Schonbeck. Bart Hopkin, editor of the valuable journal Experimental Musical Instruments, has built a range of clever instruments from wooden saxophones and the “disorderly tumbling forth” keyboard to noisemakers, both electric (“Savart’s wheel”) and acoustic (“open siren”). Jody Kruskal has designed and built instruments mostly for the theatre and been a music director and composer with directors Ralph Lee and Julie Taymor; he also founded the Public Works Ensemble, a community music group in Cambridge, N.Y., which uses homemade and original instruments. Mobius Operandi, the performing group of Oliver DiCicco, has employed his innovative instruments, string (triangular 18-stringed zitherlike “Trylon“), wind (two-player, saxophone-inspired “Duo Capi“), and percussion (graphite-and-wood “Crawdad“). The anonymous art-rock band The Residents can be heard playing homemade instruments on Fingerprince and Eskimo. James Jacson, bassoonist in Sun Ra’s Arkestra, built the Ancient Infinity Lightning Wood Drum out of timber from a tree that had been struck by lightning. His performances, drumming with two long hooked sticks, became highlights of Arkestra sets.

Certain builders find their tradition not in instrument type so much as in material; for them, the medium truly is the message. Note the ongoing enthusiasm for ceramics. The clay instruments of Barry Hall include such hybrids as the Stone Fiddle, which can be blown or drummed as well as bowed, and globular horns that incorporate a membrane for drumming. Composer/musician Brian Ransom has built ceramic instruments that cover the spectrum from string and percussion to various wind instruments: flute, reed, and horn. Some are also handsome sculptures, such as Ransom’s series “Deities Of Sound.” Ward Hartenstein has composed for and performed on his own ceramic percussion instruments, notably drums and marimbas. Inspired by pre-Columbian Indian instruments, Susan Rawcliffe has specialized in clay flutes, from traditional designs to her own radical in
novations. The latter range from ball-and-tube flutes and water flutes—both somewhat unpredictable in their tone production—to the two-player Sea Beastie. While living in New York City, Chinese composer Tan Dun collaborated with potter Ragnar Naess to make over 50 ceramic percussion, wind, and string instruments; they were featured in Tan’s Soundshape and Nine Songs, a ritual opera.

Darrell De Vore’s heart belongs to bamboo, from which he has constructed flutes, singing tubes, outer-air aerophones, and an array of percussion instruments, from chimes and marimbas to his own stamped or scraped Bootoo sticks. The Glass Orchestra performs exclusively on instruments that use glass either as the main sound source or to modify the sound. (Yet another beloved medium is trash.)

Instrument building also has its traditions for different kinds of spectacle. How could a classicist like Partch not appreciate the Colosseum-like spirit behind what might be called Danger Music? Barry Schwartz had to wear insulated gloves with metal tips on the fingers to strum his “fountain harp,” in which each 16-foot-long string carried 15,000 volts, and balls of electricity traveled the strings. Scot Jenerik donned gloves wired with contact mics in the fingertips to perform on his “faustschlag”: a sheet of steel covered with flaming lighter fluid. D.A. Thierren, founder of the Comfort/Control group in Phoenix AZ, has worn his “body drum”: The 240 volts and 200 amps touch insulated pads on his skin, and he is then played by a musician who uses equally charged 3/4-inch steel drumsticks. The Damoclesian “hoverdrum” of Timothy North is suspended from the ceiling with the performer inside it, serving as its motor while struggling to maintain control over the instrument. These musicians have one foot in the realm of performance art and endurance art; they share a tradition with the work of Chris Burden, as well as with the sculptors of kinetically violent machines, such as Mark Pauline or Jean Tinguely.

The field of sound sculpture has seen noteworthy work from Norman A. Andersen, Peter Chamberlain, and Bill Fontana. The focus of this study, however, concerns a distinction provided by sculptor and instrument builder Tom Jenkins: “The instruments I build all produce sound when manipulated by the user. The sculpture, however, operates using an energy source.” Of course there are overlaps here too: John Driscoll has built sound sculptures that the public can play; the amplified screens of Richard Lerman are sculpture as “Sound-Seen,” but can also be used in performance as transducers; composer-musician Butch Morris has collaborated with different visual artists to create his “music machines”: music boxes that combine an original design with an original composition.

Installations and site-specific works are closer in spirit to performerless sound sculptures than to music, yet most artists working in these areas inevitably get drawn into instrument building as well, because the nature of the site dictates the kind of instrument to be used. Patrick Zentz‘s large-scale mechanical structures are designed to “translate” environmental forces, with wind or sunlight or water triggering sound production; his urban-themed “Crank” has drums triggered by photoelectric cells that respond to traffic density. The “Terrain Instrument” constructions and installations of Leif Brush represent a different attempt to sound the music of a landscape. Peter Richards‘ “Wave Organ” arranged lengths of pipe along a seashore to monitor and modify sea sounds. The more hands-on siteworks of Nicolas Collins, such as Water Works, Niche, and Sweeps, have made static architectural spaces flexible by adjusting a tent of sails.

The tradition of American instrument-building also accommodates people who function at the fringe of the musical circles of their day, suggesting an overflow of creative energy that cannot be confined to music’s professional arenas. Their work exists in its own zone, where avant-garde music overlaps sheer eccentricity—they are the “outsider artists” of American music.

Most come to build music through their experience with sculpture. Fred “Spaceman” Long attaches pickups to his one-of-a-kind junk-metal constructions for his series of “Jokers.” The metal sound sculptures of Reinhold Marxhausen produce a tiny fragile music just for their player’s delectation: His “Stardust” series and “Cosmic Cubes” are shaken close to the ear; his “Manual Walkmans” sit right on your ears, like headphones, only the speakers are replaced by clusters of spines to be plucked. The stainless-steel Waterphone of sculptor Richard Waters produces tones on metal rods which are bowed or beaten; the sound is modified by the water within the instrument. Art teacher Bob Bates has developed a series of Converters that create sustained bowed tones through the use of wheels controlled by foot pedals, which continuously rub the strings. A taste for Partchian spectacle informs the elaborate musical sculptures of Arthur Frick: His “Tug” employs reeds that are sounded by a large bellows which two musicians must ride like a seesaw; the “Beepmobile” turns a huge horn into an even larger tricycle.

A few instrument builders, however, come to create music from an inner need, and are, if you like, called to it. One such was Arthur K. Ferris, a New Jersey landscape gardener and autodidact in music and woodworking, who began constructing handsome string instruments in the mid-1920s, when he was about 50 years old. He made an array of them, small and large, over the next 20-odd years, setting harps over the viol’s fingerboard and face to enable its one or more players to combine plucked and bowed sounds.

The multi-traditionalism spawned by instrument building also includes the trend of composers writing for the instruments other composers or musicians have invented, such as John Zorn and Anne LeBaron composing for Partch instruments, or John Cage and Joan La Barbara making pieces
for Dean Drummond’s zoomoozophone. Such cross-fertilizations are just one more instance of the enduring value of the instrument-building spirit in American music.

from I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music
By Nicole V. Gagné
© 2003 NewMusicBox

The use of non-instruments in place of the traditional concert arsenal is an essential face of instrument-building. “The stealing is one aspect, the recycling is another. It involves looking for a solution,” was how the percussionist Z’ev explained his quest for the sound he wanted to hear. Not surprisingly, the relatively uninhibited field of percussion was quickest to appropriate whatever it needed. Ground—and glass—was broken in the 1930s scores of William Russell: The “Foxtrot” of his Three Dance Movements calls for a bottle to be smashed; Made In America is scored for auto brake drums, tin cans, suitcase, washboard, lion’s roar, a drum kit made of found objects, and a Baetz’ Rhythm Rotor (a mechanical device that produced rhythmic ticks, similar to Leon Theremin‘s Rhythmicon). Russell’s music figured prominently in the percussion concerts Lou Harrison and John Cage began giving in 1939. Tin cans and automobile brake drums were also put to use alongside Asian instruments for their own compositions, which include Cage’s Construction series, Harrison’s Song Of Quetzalcóatl and Simfony #13, and their collaboration Double Music.

This formula of combining American scrap and percussion with foreign instruments also was fruitful for the Hawaii-inspired Exotica Music of composer/arranger/musician Martin Denny. Spike Jones, who introduced the “birdaphone” in “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” enjoyed a vigorous career composing and arranging a gleeful satiric music that employed gunshots, car horns, whistles, cow bells, and much more. The public of course has long enjoyed such music, as evidenced by the unwavering enthusiasm for the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling, which persists decades after they were made. The improvising percussionists David van Tieghem and David Moss have employed novelty devices, such as toys and bottles and vibrators, as much for their comedy as for their musicality. Performances by Triptych MythCooper-Moore, Tom Abbs, and Chad Taylor—involve the audience in building an instrument from whatever’s on hand. For sheer zaniness, the Spike Jones Award must go to the Car Horn Organ of Wendy Mae Chambers, in which auto horns are arranged in the chromatic scale over two octaves and played by a keyboard.

A special tradition exists for appropriating humble debris, as Partch did with the liquor bottles of his “Zymo-Xyl.” The need for a percussion orchestra in just intonation led Harrison and William Colvig to construct an American gamelan orchestra that featured cut-off oxygen tanks, galvanized garbage cans, and a metallophone of cut aluminum slabs with stacked tin cans as resonators. Nicknamed Old Grandad, Harrison wrote several major works for it, including La Koro Sutro and Young Caesar. Barry Hall, along with designing and building his own ceramic instruments, created the “flowerpotophone“: a kind of marimba using tiers of different-sized clay flowerpots. Hubcaps are what it’s about with the “hubkaphone” of composer/musican Henry Threadgill. Stuart Dempster used a plastic sewer pipe as a didjeridu in his ecstatic Didjeridervish – 1976. Peter Van Riper has used cut aluminum baseball bats suspended from a wire stretched across the performance space; played by other bats and by bamboo, wood, or metal strikers, Van Riper describes his “Whomp Whip” (the commercial name on some of the bats) as “a kind of gamelan chimes.” Conlon Nancarrow attempted to create a pneumatic-driven percussion machine that would strike drumheads and wood blocks, but the effort never gelled; he instead turned his attention to the player piano, and the rest was music history. Nancarrow’s check was finally cashed by Matt Heckart, whose Mechanical Sound Orchestra used a computer to play large factory objects.

The more extreme exponents of noise rock have also been ready to appropriate whatever hardware they need. Eugene Chadbourne‘s amplified implements have included rakes and electric drills. Boyd Rice (aka Non) has played a shoe polisher and electric fan through his guitar. Z’ev sought an angry, industrial ecstasy, hammering and hurling tubs and pans and bottles and pipes and springs. Fast Forward found a lot of his percussion arsenal on the street: metal cans, springs, pipes, parking signs, hubcaps. The “Twoba” was made for him by Wes Virginia, using a wheeled coat rack and lengths of cardboard tubing and metal pipes or electrical conduit. Fast Forward’s Dead Thunderbirds combined alarm sirens, steel drums, and hundreds of glass liquor bottles.

The next stop after humble debris is plain old garbage, and this medium has its traditions as well. At its forefront are Skip La Plante and Carole Weber, who founded the composers’ collective Music For Homemade Instruments solely to invent, build, compose for, and perform on instruments made from trash and found objects. Percussion abounds, naturally: marimbas made from cardboard tubes for the “carimba,” and meta
l electrical conduit pipes for the 31-pitch-to-the-octave “coba.” Partch’s liquor bottles are reborn in the pint wine bottles of La Plante’s “boweryphone.” His string instruments include the zitherlike “kanon,” with 17 strings and movable bridges. He’s also produced panpipes made of glass test tubes and other wind instruments played like flutes, horns, and clarinets. La Plante’s homemade instruments are the center of Keith King‘s music theatre piece Second Species; he’s also set them up as outdoor installations and invited passersby to play them.

“I spent a lot of time with found objects and in junkyards,” recalled Pauline Oliveros, who has clamped telephone dial-changer rods to the beams inside a piano and bowed them. Her “Applebox” pieces were just that: appleboxes with contact mics, which were resonated with various objects. Jim Hobart has created instruments from recycled materials: “Buick,” a fretless nine-string harp using a dome-shaped hubcap as a sounding board; “Doorchimes,” a scrap of hollow-core door found in a dumpster, with seven strings spanning its length, each divided into two notes. Ken Butler has built numerous witty and ironic guitars, using for his bodies exhaust manifolds, bicycle wheels, hockey sticks, tennis racquets, hand tools, and much more. His imaginative, contraption-filled installations use weird amalgams of instrument parts, furniture, and machinery, which are controlled by a keyboard. Butler also delights in reinventing string instruments: His T-Square Quartet, composed for the Soldier String Quartet, supplies the musicians with his own violins, viola, and cello, constructed from such homely objects as LPs and t-squares.

The appropriation of natural materials occurs less frequently. One exception is the Semi-Civilized Tree of visual artist Nazim Özel; made from a section of branches, it provides numerous tiers for harp-like strings that can be plucked, beaten, or bowed. Bart Hopkin‘s instructions on how to build a “driftwood marimba” typify the value of instrument building: “Any driftwood marimba you make will have its own musical personality, based on its particular set of pitch relationships, tone qualities, and spatial layout. It will give rise to its own characteristic music.” John Cage overcame his resistance to improvisation by using instruments that were free of the improviser’s tastes and memories: amplified plant materials for Branches (“You’re discovering them […] it very shortly disintegrates and you have to replace it with another one you don’t know.”) and water-filled conch shells for Inlets (“You have no control whatsoever over the conch shell when it’s filled with water […] the rhythm belongs to the instruments and not to you.”).

Appropriation also offers its own spectacles, vast and intimate. Charlie Morrow‘s self-described “event/composition” Toot ‘N Blink Chicago had large boats, anchored in a semi-circle near the shore, sounding their horns and flashing their lights at the radioed commands of a conductor. The Music By Allison of Fluxus composer Alison Knowles used sounds generated by waving various fabrics. La Monte Young‘s Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, etc. employed the sounds made by moving the eponymous furniture.

The mischievous spirit of appropriation is at its most ironic when toy musical instruments are played in place of real ones. Today, the toy piano has earned itself a flock of exponents, with music written for it by such composers as John Cage (Suite For Toy Piano), George Crumb (Ancient Voices Of Children), Julia Wolfe (East Broadway), and Wendy Mae Chambers (Mandala). The Residents restricted themselves to toy instruments for their Goosebumps EP; the band Pianosaurus concertized and recorded playing nothing else.

from I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music
By Nicole V. Gagné
© 2003 NewMusicBox

 

Instrument “deconstruction”—preparation, retuning, alteration of performance techniques—is as much a part of instrument building as construction is. The great innovator in this realm was Henry Cowell, whose piano pieces The Banshee and The Aeolian Harp required the player to pluck and strum the instrument’s strings. Former Cowell-pupil John Cage embedded bolts and utensils and strips of material into the piano’s strings for such classic prepared-piano pieces as Three Dances and Sonatas And Interludes. Cage’s technique was adopted by Conlon Nancarrow for his Study No. 30. (Nancarrow also modified the two player pianos in his studio to produce more specialized sounds: one percussive, the other more harpsichord-like.) The “timbre piano” was Lucia Dlugoszewski‘s development and she gave ferocious performances playing inside the piano with glass, brushes, rubber, and other implements, not only in her solo Five Radiant Grounds, but also in several ensemble works, including The Suchness Of Nine Concerts. Stephen Scott‘s music, such as The Tears Of Niobe, puts ensembles of musicians to work bowing the piano’s strings. The great keyboard improvisers Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor both recorded duets in which they played the piano’s interior: Taylor with guitarist Derek Bailey on Pleistozaen Mit Wasser and Sun Ra with vibraphonist Walt Dickerson on Visions.

Paper and cardboard tubing and water and other unusual materials have also been used to modify the sound and extend the range of conventional instruments. Such techniques have been employed by composers as different as George Crumb (Night Music I; Music For A Summer Evening) and Donald Martino (B,A,B,B,I,T,T). This availability, however, was felt most keenly by a generation of improvisers. Anne LeBaron recalls Davey Williams “using eggbeaters and electric fish to play his guitar”—and encouraging her to use found-object and paper preparations in her harp playing. John Zorn played an exploded clarinet, honking and chirping through its component sections; he’d also blow duck calls through his saxophone. George Lewis was adept performing on pieces of his trombone. Tom Cora played his amplified cello with toys and wires as well as a bow and his fingers. Saxophonist Jim Sauter, of the noise trio Borbetomagus, has used an extended sound chamber with a rubber hose or neck attached to the mouthpiece. Guitarist Donald Miller has written of himself, Sauter, and saxophonist Donald Dietrich, “For years each of us has struggled individually with extending the sonorities of our instruments into new and further realms of brutality.”

A similar spirit exists in certain scores for massed voices, an attempt to melt down the instrument and fashion something new out of it by multiplying it. The connection is direct with music for ensembles of electric guitars, such as Glenn Branca‘s The Spectacular Commodity and The Ascension; Rhys Chatham‘s Guitar Ring and An Angel Moves Too Fast To See; James Tenney‘s Septet and “Water On The Mountain – Fire In Heaven”; and the multi-tracked Pat Metheny in Steve Reich‘s Electric Counterpoint. It also informs more traditional concert scores. Some are (relatively) intimate, such as Julius Eastman’s The Holy Presence, Joan D’Arc for 10 cellos, or Steve Reich’s Four Organs and Six Pianos. Others are in cinemascope: the 80 trombones of Henry Brant‘s Orbits; the 100 tubas of Anthony Braxton‘s Composition No. 19; the 30 harps of Wendy Mae ChambersThe Grand Harp Event. The music can even be intimate and/or epic, as with Alan Hovhaness‘s Ruins Of Ani for four Bb clarinets or any multiple thereof, or La Monte Young‘s Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F., for “piano(s) or gong(s) or ensembles of at least 45 instruments of the same timbre, or combinations of the above or orchestra.”

A more literal refashioning of instruments is found, not surprisingly, among those in search of tunings. Erv Wilson designed and Scott Hackleman constructed a clavichord that plays 19 tones to the octave and features a unique two-dimensional keyboard arrangement. Arnold Dreyblatt‘s Orchestra of Excited Strings, along with its justly-tuned keyboards and brass, uses two double bass bodies modified to produce a single fundamental tone and its natural overtones.

There are numerous instances of Harry Partch having retuned conventional instruments to play alongside his own ensemble: clarinet, bass clarinet, and string bass in Oedipus; clarinet, bass clarinet, and cello in The Bewitched; string bass in Revelation In The Courthouse Park; baritone saxophone and alto saxophone/trumpet in Ulysses At The Edge. The retuning of conventional instruments has itself become a convention over the years. Composers who have written scores for instruments in quarter-tone tunings include Charles Ives (Three Quarter-Tone Pieces), Alan Hovhaness (O Lord, Bless Thy Mountains), and Lejaren Hiller (String Quartet No. 5). In Changes, James Tenney retuned a sextet of harps in sixths of a semitone, dividing the equal-tempered octave into 72 pitches: “It provides extremely good approximations of all the important just intervals up through the eleven limit. But it’s practical on a tempered instrument.” Among the composers who have gone straight into just-intonation tunings are Lou Harrison (Strict Songs), former Partch associate Ben Johnston (Sonata For Microtonal Piano, Quintet For Groups, Two Sonnets Of Shakespeare), Terry Riley (The Crow’s Rosary), and James Tenney (Bridge). Before he began working with the harmonic series, Glenn Branca employed “somewhere between seven and ten different tunings” for the guitars in his ensemble. His Harmonic Series Chords is scored for a conventional orchestra—but it sure doesn’t sound like one! Other noteworthy microtonal composers include Easley Blackwood (Fanfare, Suite For Guitar), John Eaton (Microtonal Fantasy), and Johnny Reinhard (Odysseus).

A lot of musics include alternate tunings for coloristic effects, but when improvisers change their instrument from equal temperament to just intonation, they’re rebuilding it:

La Monte Young retuned his piano for The Well-Tuned Piano; Terry Riley retuned his keyboards, electric (The Descending Moonshine Dervishes) and piano (The Harp Of New Albion); Pauline Oliveros had her accordion retuned into just intonation. “It took a while to get used to it and to hear how to use it,” she said, “but it worked for me right away.” The ongoing dedication of these artists to their retuned instruments underscores the value of their having made such a leap.

from I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music
By Nicole V. Gagné
© 2003 NewMusicBox

 

The pioneers of American electronic music were perforce instrument builders. Thaddeus Cahill built three “Telharmoniums,” or “Dynamophones,” between 1900 and 1906. This keyboard instrument produced sine-wave tones at frequencies corresponding to the chromatic scale. Like an organ, its keys were touch sensitive for dynamic control, and it included filters to provide wind- and string-like timbres.

By the mid-teens, Henry Cowell was exploring the possibility of developing a machine that could generate multi-rhythms unavailable from conventional instruments. His work with Russian inventor Leon Theremin on the construction of the “Rhythmicon” led to Cowell’s 1932 concerto with orchestra Rhythmicana. The “Rhythmicon” was refined to permit tempo modifications and produce sounds tuned to the overtone series. Charles Ives, who financed its construction, wrote to Nicolas Slonimsky, “It relieved my mind to know especially that the new one would really be nearer to an instrument, than a machine.”

This desire for new electronic instruments, enervated by the Depression and the Second World War, flourished in the 1960s. Bye Bye Butterfly and I Of IV are real-time electronic music by Pauline Oliveros, playing oscillators set above the range of human hearing. They generated difference tones of audible frequency, which she amplified and fed into a tape-delay system, which she was also playing. “The instrument is constructed carefully,” she explained, “so I can interact with it at a deep level.” Donald Buchla‘s synthesizer “was probably the first, total home-studio synthesizer in the normal sense of the word,” according to composer Morton Subotnick. The mid-’60s also saw Robert Moog‘s keyboard-controlled synthesizer. The Theremin’s spatial-control technique was taken further by Buchla’s Lightning interface design, which relies on wands and can compute directionality, speed, and acceleration. Buchla’s more-hands-on Thunder design employs touchplates to produce synthesized sound.

Harry Partch may have had no feeling for electronics, but electronic composers have certainly shown great affinity with his attitudes and methods. “I think of a sound I want to hear, then construct a device to play that sound,” said Jim Wilson, reiterating the instrument-builder’s credo. As the music-making duo Voice Of Eye, he and Bonnie McNaim have combined electronic and acoustic sounds, frequently on instruments they’ve built, such as the “Squawkbox,” controlled by bioelectricity from the player’s body. A different approach to electronics is offered by Reed Ghazala, who has used “circuit bending“: deliberately shorting the circuits of audio equipment to produce unexpected sounds. His “Video Octavox” features a synthesizer that responds to the movement of light from a television set; his various “Incantors” create random alterations of synthesized-speech. Chico MacMurtrie‘s Trigram, a self-described “robot opera,” combined 15 musicians with 35 machines of his own devising, which play music and make noise.

In the real-time performance of electronic music, a master instrument builder need never swing a hammer: Laurie Spiegel, for example, devised her Macintosh software Music Mouse to enable the performance of real-time computer music, without relying on an instrumental keyboard or acoustic or sampled sounds. Salvatore Martirano built his Sal-Mar Construction, a 24-speaker synthesizer system, to permit simultaneous creation and performance of improvisatory compositions. David Tudor, having combined live electronics with piano for John Cage (Variations II) and with bandoneon for Lowell Cross (Musica Instrumentalis), began performing on mostly custom-built modular electronic devices, many made by himself. By choosing specific electronic components and transducers and their interconnections, he defined both composition and performance for such works as Hedgehog and 9 Lines, Reflected. Jerry Hunt designed innovative computer systems and employed proximity detectors to trigger electronic sounds in his often highly energetic performances. His Quaquaversal Transmission 4 used two-way telephone lines for live interactive computer-system performance of audio, video, light systems, and micro-robotic groups.

John Bi
schoff
, Chris Brown, Scot Gresham Lancaster, Tim Perkis, Phil Stone, and Mark Trayle formed The Hub, connecting and combining their individual computer systems to create complex, live electronic music. Tom Cameron composed and performed electronic music in real-time, combining the structure of hardware and programming with what he calls “spontaneous composition.” The Toy Symphony of composer/inventor Tod Machover uses high-tech Music Toys that he designed with the MIT Media Lab; they serve as sophisticated interactive instruments with which children can play and compose music.

With electronics, the instrument maker can also become something of a cyborg builder: Morton Subotnick employed the conductor’s baton to control the electronics in A Desert Flowers; Laetitia de Compiegne Sonami has used her “Lady’s Glove,” an elbow-length, left-handed glove with 16 pressure and direction sensors, to control a computer and create electronic sound. A further cyborg strain involves taking an instrument and redesigning it electronically. In Subotnick’s “ghost scores,” such as The Wild Beasts and Axolotl, there are no pre-recorded electronic sounds; instead, the live sound of the instrumentalist is picked up, modified, and played back during the performance over loudspeakers.

Others have pursued more extreme revisions of their instruments. The “mutantrumpet” of Ben Neill “started out as an acoustic instrument with three bells and a trombone slide, with an extra set of valves for routing the sound into the different bells. It has a number of switches, pressure-sensitive pads, and little controllers that I use to send MIDI messages to the computer to modify things as they’re playing.” Jon Hassell transformed the sound of his trumpet with tape loops, synthesizers, and other electronic systems. Jon English added a tape-delay system to his trombone for Electrombonics. Nicolas Collins employed a trombone as the controller for his digital reverb, using the slide as a digital pot, with a keypad to access the computer that manipulated the reverb. Laurie Anderson has performed on violins interfaced to a Synclavier. Multiple delay systems characterize the justly-tunedExpanded Accordion” of Pauline Oliveros, who controls the delay time using foot pedals.

“There’s always been evolution of instruments—if you just look into music history, it’s there,” observed Pauline Oliveros, whose vast experience in the field even includes a brief stint in Partch’s ensemble for Oedipus. “There are lots of reasons to invent instruments.” The most important reason remains the same, regardless of the field of instrument-building: to hear the special music that only a new instrument can provide.

from I Built It! The Built Environment In American Music
By Nicole V. Gagné
© 2003 NewMusicBox

 

Nicole V. Gagné (shown here playing her attis-viol) is the co-author (with Tracy Caras) of Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers and the author of Sonic Transports and Soundpieces 2. She has written about music for numerous magazines, contributed to the New Grove II, and lectured on music at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Pittsburgh.