Ivor Darreg
Ivor Darreg
Ivor Darreg is well known for his many microtonal; instruments, and has played in many alternate tunings including 19-tet. In his notes, Darreg comments:
"The 19-tone scale is next. We have to spend some time on it because it will probably be used more than the others in the 13-through-24 region, the region of systems I would like to call metachromatic -- I have been looking for a good name for some years now. Not microtonal certainly, because the intervals of all the scales up to 24 and perhaps including 24, are still wide enough to be melodically distinct and useful for creating new melodies."
"In recommending two-part counterpoint as your early experimenting in these scales, and as concession you well might make to your new listeners, before you go in for heavy chords, doubling, and elaborate lushness at the beginning stage of performing and composing in Non-Twelve Systems, I realize I am going against the recommendations of an important book which tried to promote 19-tone....one recently reprinted by the way: Joseph Yasser's Theory of Evolving Tonality."
"Before I dared refute or contest his argument in that book, I have composed and improvised and performed and built and modified instruments in 19-tone, his recommended next step in musical progress or evolution as I guess he would call it. Other people have followed me as well as the considerable number who have preceded me in exploiting the nineteen-tone system. Yasser was more the theorist, who wrote about it--back in the 1920's and 1930's he could not possibly have had access to the resources you and I would not find available."