Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (29 page)

No keyboard innovation since Jankó’s has come as close to commercial success. Hopeful amateurs still have not given up. One of England’s leading orthopedic surgeons, Graham Apley proposed a new arrangement in 1991, in which black and white keys alternated and each major scale began either with
one or with the other. The next year, Henri Carcelle won France’s leading prize of its kind, the Lepine Inventions Contest, with a similar keyboard alternating short and long keys, linked to a new notation system that presented scores vertically rather than horizontally. Yet these inventors faced the same roadblock as Jankó; the doubt that any advantages of innovation could justify the agony of
reeducation.
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Curiously, new music has not seriously challenged the conventional keyboard; if anything, it has unexpectedly extended its life. Just as the acoustic piano was going through its mid-century troubles, new generations of electric instruments were emerging, some emulating pianos and organs, others expressing new sounds. If there was ever a time for
a radically new interface, for a physical device that would make a clean break from the past, it was the dawn of the electric age, the late nineteenth century. Succeeding decades saw the prime of artistic iconoclasm, the ferment of movements from futurism to surrealism. Yet none of these changes seriously challenged the familiar arrangement of keys.

The piano keyboard dominated the first years
of electronic music. When the American inventor Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell’s unsuccessful rival for priority in the invention of the telephone, introduced a “musical telegraph” in 1876, he activated his row of oscillators (really buzzers) with piano-style controls. The English physicist William Du Bois Duddell discovered how to make the carbon-arc lamps of the day produce tones—controlled
by the familiar device. The most majestic electronic instrument ever, Thomas Cahill’s Telharmonium, had 145 customized dynamos generating currents of different audio frequencies that were picked up by acoustic horns attached to telephone receivers. It was sixty feet long, weighed two hundred tons, and needed to be housed on the ground floor of its own building. And it used keyboards, too, though
these were specially constructed with thirty-six rather than twelve notes per
octave and not many musicians cared to retrain for it. (Lee de Forest, inventor of the triode tube and of the method of amplification used even in today’s radio and television, built an Audion piano of his own with a conventional keyboard but was not a serious musical experimenter.)

In the early days of electronic music
there were great hopes for new styles of performance that could bring out the striking sounds of the new instruments instead of emulating acoustic pianos and organs. The most famous (and mysterious) pioneer of this trend was Leon Theremin, the first inventor to observe that the earliest triode tubes—the basis of modern electronics and broadcasting—could be controlled by the human body’s storage
of electrical charges. Working for the Russian military during World War I, he found that the natural capacitance of a person approaching an electrical circuit could affect it and emit a signal, making it a sentinel or, as he called it, “radio watchman.” The musician’s body became part of the machine, absorbing and releasing energy wirelessly High-frequency oscillators using de Forest’s tube design
turned out to be highly sensitive to capacitances of the body. By changing the position of the hand with respect to the antenna, the operator could produce a continuously rising or falling tone. This was the first instrument played without physical contact—or rather, almost without it. Initially, a foot pedal controlled volume and a switch in the left hand helped separate notes. To make operation
more dramatically touch-free, Theremin added a second antenna, controlled by motions of the left hand.
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Theremin was a gifted amateur, and a cellist rather than a pianist. His Etherphone had a cellolike range of three or four octaves and a tone ranging from cello to violin. He also adapted his invention as an electronic cello without strings, played by a fingerboard. Yet when RCA executives
tried to commercialize Theremin’s invention as an electrical rival to the piano, they rediscovered what had made keyboards so popular for centuries. The Etherphone, renamed the Theremin, demanded exceptional musical skills. Empty space had no visual cues for the hands; even singers use the feedback of their own vocal cords. The theremin player needed precise musical intuition and physical orientation
to produce acceptable pitch. RCA was able to build and sell fewer than five hundred, and cut its losses. Theremin finally had to devise keyboard models (as well as fingerboard models, with strings for sliding fingers) to sustain public interest, though even these failed. Advanced technology turned out to demand such extremely refined technique that even after Robert Moog (an engineer and nonmusician)
revived the production of antenna theremins in the 1950s, there have been
few professional players. The best-known of these remained Theremin’s protégée Clara Rockmore, a violinist already acclaimed as a prodigy who had not only absolute pitch but masterly control of her gestures and superb musicianship. A theremin with a keyboard was an eerie-sounding organ, accessible but musically uninteresting.
With antennas it was a sonic laboratory for a small circle of enthusiasts. Rockmore and the handful of other theremin virtuosi were unhappy that the instrument’s leading use was in science-fiction films and the music of groups like the Beach Boys.
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Theremin might have interested more composers and made more sales had he developed his keyboard version further, or at least used an easier-to-play
fingerboard like that of Friedrich Trautwein’s Trautonium (1932). A fellow cellist-inventor, the Frenchman Maurice Martenot, showed the path not taken. His Ondes (Waves) Martenot (1928) was based on Theremin’s tone-generating circuitry but controlled in early versions by a wire attached to a ring on the player’s finger, which could be moved up and down a simple piano keyboard layout, solving most
of the problems of pitch that challenged Theremin users. Martenot’s instrument became the first electronic device to be welcomed into the classical repertory. For the Jankó piano, with its innovative arrangement, only a few exercises had been published; for the Ondes Martenot, there were works by Arthur Honegger, Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, and Edgard Varèse. The Paris Conservatory appointed
Martenot to a chair of his own instrument after the war—an unusual academic recognition for a musical inventor. Martenot was able to combine the familiar interface with control of timbres in a way that Theremin was not.
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As the Ondes Martenot was arriving, the most versatile and ubiquitous of keyboard instruments, the piano, was technologically
stagnating, with no significant improvements after the 1890s. In 1948, the piano scholar Ernest Hutcheson could preface his influential handbook,
The Literature of the Piano
, with a technological wish list. Most important, he called the key action and sostenuto pedal “somewhat clumsy” and hoped for a new action permitting “greater delicacies of touch and inflection.” Yet over fifty years later,
the acoustic piano remains almost what it was in the 1890s. Plastics and other new materials have found only a limited—and not always successful—role in mechanical components. The piano, once a hybrid of craft and industrial innovation, is now marketed as a sign of tradition and
preservation—a trend perhaps visible even early in the twentieth century, when the ratio of grand to upright pianos
sold began to rise. Scarce labor and materials have raised the price of pianos well above the cost of living. Most other complex consumer products, notably automobiles and television sets, need less frequent maintenance than they did two or three generations ago; pianos still require regular service from master technicians. And competently reconditioned and rebuilt older pianos, unlike nearly all
vintage electronics, are competitive with current models.
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To some, the acoustic piano seems to be a glorious anachronism, a trophy technology like a luxury mechanical watch, always in the shadow of yesterday’s masterpieces. Such thinking can easily become self-confirming as designers fear to tamper with proven mechanisms. Fortunately, there are always a few men and women who refuse to be intimidated
by stability They find new and better ways to make wristwatches, draft-animal agricultural implements, and acoustic instruments. Recently, an American firm, Fandrich Piano, has developed a spring-loaded upright piano action with the feel of a grand. Ron Overs, an Australian piano rebuilder and dealer, has used computer-assisted design (CAD) to devise a radically new action claimed to reduce
friction by up to 50 percent, improving response, sound output, and durability, and reducing the frequency of tuning: potentially the most fundamental proposed change in the piano since the Jankó keyboard, and the first major response to Hutcheson’s call for a more responsive touch. A number of prominent concert pianists have already auditioned Overs’s action, built into a concert grand piano,
and endorsed it enthusiastically. Overs is planning to produce his own line, and international manufacturers have expressed interest in licensing the action.

The Overs action’s success depends not only on its construction but on its effect on the skills that pianists and piano teachers already possess. If it lets them achieve the same effects with less fatigue it may help revive the acoustic
piano market; but no matter how well it works, there probably will always be some pianists who will prefer the higher friction of the conventional action, just as Chopin disdained the Erard repetition lever that was so revolutionary in the 1820s.
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The greatest impact on the keyboard world has come not from the acoustic piano but from electronic music, with its relatively rapid technical changes.
The postwar pioneer of synthesizers was Raymond Scott, a musician and inventor who had made innovative soundtracks for Warner Bros. cartoons. Scott’s Clavivox, patented in 1950, used a keyboard to achieve a
theremin-like continuous tone, but it never reached the mass audience he had hoped for despite numerous improvements. The electronic synthesizer market was opened to performers by one of Scott’s
collaborators, Robert Moog. Moog was one of two designers who realized the new possibilities for music synthesizers after the price of silicon junction transistors fell from $1,000 to 25 cents between 1957 and 1964, allowing Moog to build an instrument in the $10,000 range. The keyboard was only one of a number of devices that could be plugged in as modules trigger voltage changes to control
the output of these transistors. Trautonium-style sliding strips with variable resistance were equally feasible, and Moog developed a new “ribbon controller,” a potentiometer along which a finger could be moved up and down. The sociologists Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco have discovered that it was Moog’s customers—musicians and synthesizer experimenters—who urged him to use the keyboard instead.
Donald Buchla, a fellow pioneer but a musician and composer rather than a product developer, rejected the twelve-tone keyboard as a constraint on the range of new music. His original synthesizer used touch-sensitive plates. Buchla proudly describes himself as “an old fashioned builder of instruments” rather than a machine builder. His controllers are boldly innovative, but thus appeal to a smaller
number of musicians than those based on the traditional keyboard layout.
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Of course, it was precisely mechanical familiarity that shifted synthesizer development to Moog’s keyboard model. Early publicity photographs of the Moog put the keyboard in the forefront to reassure prospective buyers that they would be able to play it. And a single LP suggested the wonderful things that could be played
with it. Walter (now Wendy) Carlos’s
Switched-On Bach
, released by CBS Records in 1968, became one of history’s best-selling classical recordings and was praised by Glenn Gould as the best recording of the Brandenburg Concertos he had ever heard. Carlos seemed to show a wealth of expressive possibilities in what had been thought a one-dimensional instrument. The original Buchla remained one of
a long line of relatively obscure academic and experimental instruments, favored by composers seeking new kinds of sounds. Thus just before Carlos was using the Moog to pay homage to sources of keyboard music, the composer Morton Subotnick was proclaiming distinctively electronic values with his album
Silver Apples on the Moon
, recorded with the Buchla.
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Beginning with the Beatles and the Rolling
Stones, generations of rock and pop musicians brought the Moog and its imitators into mainstream
music. In the 1980s, Japanese manufacturers helped make the keyboard synthesizer a standard instrument. Pianists could travel with their own keyboards, and some performance places no longer kept a piano. Newer electronic pianos allow a rock musician to hold keyboards like guitars, making possible a
full range of body motions. New generations of equipment, especially integrated circuits, have enhanced the electronic keyboard’s power to imitate acoustic instruments, making it the piano’s successor as the “orchestra in a box.” As the musicologist James Parakilas has observed of the rock scene, and the continuing power of the keyboard as musical interface, it now has “such a spectacular menu of
sounds that keyboard players could put some of their fellow band members out of work at the same time as they put the instrument they themselves originally played—the piano—out of business.”
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Even as the manufacture of keyboard instruments has been globalized, so has their use. Some advanced commercial synthesizers are preprogrammed with a variety of non-Western scales available by simple adjustments.
In Arab and Arab-American music, for example, where acoustic pianos were never important instruments, the versatile keyboard synthesizer is now ubiquitous as the “Arab org.”