CHAPTER 19

About Diapas~n
(1996)

From Greek (he) dia pason (chordon symphonia) ... (the concord) through
all (the notes) ... "a hurst of harmonious sound ... a full deep outburst
of sound" (Websters) ... also an organ stop, and (earlier) the octave; (still
earlier) the set of pitches that might "fill" an octave (i.e., a scale or mode).
Here I am using it to refer to a band of seventeen adjacent harmonic
partials of a very low fundamental (a B~ at approximately 29 Hz). This
band is not stationary but moves very gradually from one pitch position
to another within the harmonic series, and as it- moves, the bandwidth
changes as well. For example, near the beginning and the end of the
piece, the "diapason" includes harmonics from the forty-eighth through
sixty-fourth (thus defining an interval of a perfect fourth), whereas at the
dynamic climax of the piece (at about two-thirds to three-quarters of the
way through), it includes the first through the seventeenth partials (a
little more than four octaves). The harmonic sense of the work depends
to a great extent on how precisely these pitches are tuned, and since
most of the partials in the harmonic series do not coincide with pitches
of the standard 12-tone equal-tempered scale, some unusual procedures
are required to perform the piece. These include the following: ( 1) all of
the string instruments are retuned in an elaborate scordatura, such that
the pitches of every open string and its natural harmonics correspond to
some subset of the harmonic partials of the same low B~; (2) wind players
are free to choose from the set of pitches being played at any moment by
the string players nearest to them, carefully matching their pitches to the
string tones by ear but timing their entrances in a quasi-improvisational
way; and (3) to facilitate this process, each wind player is seated between

394
 About Diapa son 395

• pIay-
. g players or is, in fact, surrou nded by from four to six st rmg
vo stnn
n h0 se pitches can thus be match ed in this way.
ers w
Qne might weil ask why we should go to such extraordinary Iengths to
oduce these unusu al pitche s, and my answe r is that I believe we have
:~tered a new music- histori cal era during which there will be a resump-
tion of the evolutionary develo pment of hanno ny, a development that
had reached an impass e in Weste rn art music in about~191 ö becaus e the
12-ton e_equa l tempe rame~ t had been
resour ces of..___-_
speCifically harmonic
e.xhausted. And where as the hegem ony of 12-ton e equal tempe ramen t had
begun tobe underm ined by work with~rte r tones (and other equal divi-
sions of the octave) at about the same time (ca. 191 O) by composers like
Haba, Carrillo, lves, Wyschnegradsky, and others , it was not until the pio-
neering work by Hai::ry Partch , b~~ in~~~' and the aesthetic
revolution brought about by~~~ '1.2.il that the harmonic limita-
tions of 12-tone equal tempe ramen t began to be unders tood and a way
could be imagined in which harmony_ could serve othe r-~ta ctica l-
p~th an it had during the preced ing three and a half centuries. For
1'artch, the crucial factor was jys_ t intona tion-i. e., using pitche s tuned in
- - -
such a way that the intervals betwee n them may be characterized by rela-
tively small integer ratios betwe en freque ncies. For reasons that are both
theoretical and practical, I have come to the conclu sion that a certain
amount of tQl§..ra~ aSfil!!!l~d, with respec t to both the precision
with which it is possible to tune acoust ical instrum ents in the "real world,"
and the acuity of our audito ry systems in distinguishing small pitch dif-
ferences, although the size of the toleran ce range I have come to accept
(aboutl cents, or one-tw entieth of a tempe red semito ne) is much smaller
than that which I believe is implie d by the perfor mance of triadic-diatonic
music of the comm on practic e period on a tempe red piano (at least 15
Cents, and somet imes- as in the case of the domin ant seventh chord -as
-----
large as ~ 1 ce~ts, or nearly a third of a tempe red semitone).
1 have written elsewh ere (in "Refle ctions after Bridge," 1984) that
while Partch's contri bution to this new situati on in which we find our-
selves was primarily techni cal, Cage's contri bution was primarily aes-
thetic · ' I would now sugges t that the aesthet1c · revolut10n· wrough t bY
John Cage m · 1951 is absolu tely essent ial to any tru Iy progressive · evo-
lution • ut 1ts
of harmony, becaus e Witho · · e sh'f
· dec1sIV 1 t o
f f ocus f rom the
t
houghts and Jeelings of the compo ser-an d their "comm unicat ion" to a
• · J th
.
relative! Y passive audie nce-to the immed iate audttory expenence J e
0
 C
396 CHAP TER 19

liste ner-w hich mav be said tobe "occ asion ed" by the
, work of the
com.
Poser but assum es an active, parti cipat ory audi ence -the futur e of ~.
---- -
would rema in mire d in the past. '~ ore harm ony can
_ • 11Us1c

evoive;-ch e ro--
music itself must evolve. Othen1/ise we will simp- lyber eplä ~
scenario with mino r, "cosm etic" chan ges in the detai ls.
ymg an earlier
l

Whil e celebrating the profo und influ ence on my own

work of hoth
Harry Partc h and John Cage , I shou ld also ment ion some
aspects of much
of my mus ic-an d Diapason in parti cula r-tha t are pecu
liarly my own. The
first involves my fascination not only with just intervals but
with a particu-
lar subse t of thes e-th e hannonic series. lt is perh aps the
only thing given
to us by natur e (as distinct from cultu re) and is intimately
involved in our
perception of the vowels of speec h as well as the timb re
of musical instru-
ments. Wha t I have done that may be new is to find a numb
er of different
ways to use the harm onic series as the basis for an entir
e piece (first in
Clang for Orchestra, 1972). The secon d involves my conc ern
with fonn
not as a rhetorical device (as in the sonata) or as a mean
s to ensure "com-
prehensibility" (Schoenberg's motivation) but simply as
anoth er ohject of
perc eptio n-lik e the sounds themselves but at a larger holar
chical level.
In Diapason, the~ is determined primarily by the changes in the_E!tch-
boundaries of the band of adjacent harm onics and secon
-------------
~
darily by changes
ic level, both as a function of time, as shown in the figure
below. 2

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