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.34
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.35
MUSICAL TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF THE KEYBOARD
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.36
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.37
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.38
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.39
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.”40
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.”
THE ROADS AHEAD
The control of musical instruments is diverging. Electronic musicians have come to doubt the power of standard musical keyboards for innovation in sound. Many composers use the computer keyboard that we will be considering in the next chapter. Some of them are working with “microtonal” or “enharmonic” keyboards, which are capable of quarter tones and even finer divisions of the musical scale. John S. Allen, an MIT-trained electrical engineer, has developed a “general keyboard” that superficially looks like a Jankó model (though Allen was unfamiliar with Jankó’s patent and drew instead on earlier organ keyboard proposals). But Allen’s keyboard can play up to thirty-one tones per octave rather than Jankó’s twelve. This and other advanced designs seem inherently limited to a small number of players and listeners with highly developed pitch. Others use variants of the sliding strings, bows, and body position technology we have encountered. The capacitance of the theremin was just a beginning; new technology can translate the motions of a dancer, or eye movements, into sound. Donald Buchla has developed an instrument played with cordless wands. The independent instrument builders, academics, and performers who develop new controllers do not expect to license their innovations to major manufacturers. It is unlikely that a single new instrument will be the subject of a chair in a major conservatory as the Ondes Martenot has been. The innovators form small circles of professionals and hobbyists who give live performances and produce CDs.41
The second path of advanced technology is the electronic refinement of the standard keyboard, mainly for performing the existing repertory rather than for creating new music. Some of the best-known devices are advanced revivals of the player piano. In 1978 Marantz introduced the first electronic reproducing piano, using data encoded on cassette tapes. By 1988, the Japanese manufacturer Yamaha had produced its Disklavier, which could both record a pianist’s performance electronically and play it back from a computer diskette with more than one hundred levels of audible hammer velocity. A California musician and engineer, Wayne Stahnke, added his own refinements for the Austrian firm Bösendorfer. He used a new generation of sensors to record not the depression of keys but the velocity of hammers alone, and new types of linear motors to duplicate the action of the hammers and pedals during playback without affecting the touch of the instrument when a pianist is using it. Today the Bösendorfer 290 SE and the Yamaha nine-foot Disklavier Grand Pro are our generation’s counterparts of the greatest organs of late medieval and early modern Europe, using the virtually unchanged keyboard to produce a stunning range of sounds—the strings of acoustic pianos as well as sampled electronic sounds of as many as five hundred instruments. Fully featured electronic-acoustic concert grands sell for $300,000 or more.42
Are these hybrid pianos only a way station toward fully electronic keyboard instruments that make sounds indistinguishable from those of acoustic pianos? Perhaps, but after over three hundred years, the keyboard and the acoustic piano are still revealing new complexities that cannot be duplicated by playing prerecorded samples of individual notes electronically. Strings respond to each other’s overtones. Some piano technicians even deliberately leave the three strings that make up a single note slightly out of tune with each other to delay dissipation of the sound. We still have much to learn about soundboards, the loudspeakers of the acoustic piano, and their interaction with the vibrations of the strings. Acoustic piano dealers report that many of their buyers are young owners of electronic keyboards who grow tired of the sound and hope to upgrade.43
The greatest challenge of all may be to contrive new versions of the standard keyboard for electronic instruments, especially electronic pianos. Robert Moog has produced a “multiply-touch-sensitive” (MTS) keyboard controller with key overlays that transmit continuously the horizontal location of the player’s finger on the key (X and Y axes) and the vertical motion of the key (Z axis). The output of these sensors is connected to a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) circuit. It is possible that this and similar systems will let keyboard players develop new techniques and create musical effects that were not possible with conventional pianos. The inventors’ purpose, in fact, is not simply to reproduce music more accurately, but to promote new musical expression.44
From the electromechanical side, engineers have been doing their best to duplicate the force feedback of a traditional piano action for use in electronic pianos. Two different designs were announced in 1990. A French musical technology researcher, Claude Cadoz, and his group demonstrated a software-controlled keyboard with sixteen motorized keys; in the same year an American, Richard Baker, patented an “active touch keyboard” in which keys are connected to small motors with keyboards and pulleys with an analog controller. A third inventor, Alisdair Riddell, completed a “meta action” for use with acoustic pianos; it put the hammer at the end of a solenoid responding to contact made by the keys.45
None of these duplicated the full cycle of a conventional keyboard from initial finger contact to liftoff. This force feedback helps the pianist produce what we have seen is a theoretically amazing variety of timbres with an instrument that cuts off contact between the finger and the string once the key is depressed. A grand piano action can be modeled as the response of sets of coupled springs and other damping and stiffening parts. These complex interactions are modeled and translated into software that can easily be modified. A virtual keyboard can, for example, be adjusted to feel like any historical or innovative piano keyboard, or like a harpsichord keyboard. If other sensors are included, it should even be possible to achieve effects impossible with acoustic pianos, such as swelling a note. In his doctoral dissertation, Brent Gillespie was able to achieve a good fit between the outputs of his system and the measured responses of acoustic piano actions. He is now developing his system, called the Touchback Keyboard.46
Gillespie’s work helps illustrate the flexibility of a technology half a millennium years old. The musical keyboard was probably a fortunate by-product of other mechanical innovations. It could control music that could fill a cathedral or a domestic parlor. Its most successful adaptation, the pianoforte, had a surprisingly small initial effect on the musical world. And the changes that made it the most successful instrument of the nineteenth century did not come, at first, from the manufacturers but from the great composer-performers. It was their new techniques of playing that pushed piano builders to a century of glorious technological achievement. Because composition and
performance diverged as careers in the twentieth century, there was no comparable force for change. Composers including John Cage and George Crumb have “prepared” pianos by prescribing temporary modification of strings with small objects like bolts, screws, and rubber bands—but the spirit of hacking has been easier to extend to $2,500 personal computers than to $25,000 Steinway grands. For all the excitement of innovative instruments, new technology has on balance strengthened rather than weakened our attachment to the venerable twelve-tone keyboard. Technique sometimes transforms, but it conserves equally.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Letter Perfect?
Text Keyboards
IT IS SURPRISING that the music-making keyboard should have preceded the text-imprinting keyboard by at least five centuries. Even counting upper and lower cases, there are no more characters on a contemporary computer keyboard than there are keys on a grand piano. A medieval organ was at least as complex as a mechanical typewriter. By the eighteenth century artisans were building superb mechanisms ranging from marine chronometers to anthropomorphic automata that drew figures and wrote texts. Yet there was no commercially successful writing machine until the 1870s.
Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity Page 25