Ivor Darreg (May 5, 1917 – February 12, 1994) was an American composer and leading proponent of

microtonal Microtonal music or microtonality is the use in music of microtones— intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of t ...

or " xenharmonic" music. He also created a series of

experimental musical instrument An experimental musical instrument (or custom-made instrument) is a musical instrument that modifies or extends an existing instrument or class of instruments, or defines or creates a new class of instrument. Some are created through simple modi ...

Biography

Darreg, a contemporary of

Harry Partch Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century com ...

and a close colleague of John H. Chalmers,

Erv Wilson Ervin Wilson (June 11, 1928 – December 8, 2016) was a Mexican/ American (dual citizen) music theorist. Early life Ervin Wilson was born in a remote area of northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, where he lived until the age of fifteen. His mother taugh ...

, and

Joel Mandelbaum Mayer Joel Mandelbaum (born October 12, 1932) is an American music composer and teacher, best known for his use of microtonal tuning (notably just intonation and 19 equal temperament and the 31 equal temperament). He wrote the first Ph.D. disserta ...

, 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. Darreg was born Kenneth Vincent Gerard O'Hara in Portland,

Oregon Oregon () is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idaho. T ...

. His father John O'Hara was editor of the (Portland) Catholic Sentinel newspaper and his mother was an artist. (His Uncle, Edwin Vincent O'Hara, was a Roman Catholic Bishop.NCWC Review
, ''Cuislandora.WRLC.org''.) He dropped out of school as a teenager, but he had both self-taught facility in at least ten languages and 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, and

Electric Organ An electric organ, also known as electronic organ, is an electronic keyboard instrument which was derived from the pump organ, harmonium, pipe organ and theatre organ. Originally designed to imitate their sound, or orchestral sounds, it has sinc ...

, 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. In the 1970s Darreg built a series of instruments he called Megalyras. Part of his concept was that the several strings were to be tuned like the several pipes that comprise a single "note" in an organ stop—multiple pipes at sounding together at selected, closely related pitches to create the sense not of several tones but of one grand composite tone. Darreg lived for much of his adult life in or near

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, largest city in the U.S. state, state of California and the List of United States cities by population, sec ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, then spent his final 9 years in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United State ...

. He devoted his entire life to his music and microtonality. Ivor sported a long beard to cover the fact that due to both an illness and confrontation from a violent break in to his home in the 1950s, he had lost his teeth. He consequently taught himself to pronounce words and sing without them. He would often accompany his music with singing. He would sing the high notes in the morning when his vocal cords were tighter and the low notes in the evenings when they were more relaxed. His songs were often in Esperanto, a language in which he was fluent. He coined the term " xenharmonic", designed and built many original microtonal

musical instruments A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who pl ...

, and wrote voluminous amounts of material about various musical tunings. Perhaps his most important contribution to music 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''.

Biography

References

External links