- Ivor Darreg
Ivor Darreg (
May 5 1917 – Feb. 12,1994) was a leading proponent of andcomposer of microtonal or "xenharmonic " music. He also created a series ofexperimental musical instrument s.Darreg, a contemporary of
Harry Partch and a close colleague ofJohn Chalmers andErv Wilson , was one of America's leading theorists and practitioners of experimental intonation and experimental instrument building. Frequently he published his writings in his own Xenharmonic Bulletin. [ [http://www.frogpeak.org/fpartists/fpchalmers.html Frog Peak Artist: John Chalmers ] ]Darreg was born Kenneth Vincent Gerard O'Hara in Portland,
Oregon . His father John was editor of a weekly Catholic newspaper and his mother was an artist. He dropped out of school as a teenager, but he has self-taught facility in at least ten languages and had a basic understanding of all the sciences. His real love was music and electronics. Because of his choice of music, his father cast him out, and he and his mother set out on their own with little help from anyone. At that point he took on the name "Ivor," which means "man with bow" (from his cello-playing talents) and "Drareg" (the retrograde of "Gerard"), which he soon changed to "Darreg".In the forties, Ivor built an
Amplified Cello ,Amplified Clavichord , andElectric Organ , the Electric Keyboard Oboe and the Electric Keyboard Drum. The Amplified Clavichord and Electric Organ no longer exist, but the Electric Keyboard Oboe - like the organ, based on blocking oscillator circuits and capable of microtonality -, the Electric Keyboard Drum, which uses buzzer-like relays, and the Amplified Cello are still working.Darreg lived for much of his adult life in or near
Los Angeles ,California , then spent his final 9 years inSan Diego . He coined the term "xenharmonic ", designed and built many original microtonalmusical instruments , and wrote voluminous amounts of material about variousmusical tuning s. Perhaps his most important contribution tomusic theory was his idea that different tunings exhibit different "moods".Darreg's informal network of microtonal musicians writing letters to each other later morphed into the more formal "
Xenharmonic Alliance ", one of the inspirations for the formation of the internet "tuning list", first based atMills College and now hosted by Yahoo.References
External links
* [http://www.sonic-arts.org/darreg/index.htm Ivor Darreg] at sonic-arts.com
* [http://www.afn.org/~sejic/ivor.html Ivor Darreg] at afn.org
* [http://www.furious.com/perfect/xenharmonics.html Ivor Darreg and Xenharmonics] article at Perfect Sound Forever online magazine
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