The Pristophone and its companion the Bass Pristophone are the product of nearly a thousand hours of work beginning in 2007. I’ve built eight versions of these instruments, with the latest finished in 2017. The project was greatly enabled by my friend Jeff Strong, who graciously offered me a workshop in his attic beginning in 2016. The instrument is perpetually 97% finished, because I am always thinking of improvements.
The sound of the instrument comes from pitched circular saw blades. Nearly all of them are recycled from their previous lives in service of clearing forests, processing lumber, and building houses—possibly on those same cleared forests. I purchased many of the blades from a saw sharpener who serviced construction companies that built sprawling, half-empty housing developments south of Madison. Environmentally destructive implements are transformed into creative elements. I also chose used blades for another very practical reason; in order to find blades that have an appropriate timbre over a broad pitch range, I’ve found it necessary to search through hundreds of saws created over many decades, rather than the limited variety commercially available today.
There are 65 blades total, 14 in the bass instrument and 51 in the treble. The full range is A1-C#7. The Pristophone is 11 feet long and 8 feet tall. The Bass is 14 feet long and 7 feet tall. Because of this, playing the instrument becomes a highly physical performance. Composition is choreography. Sound is space. Much of my inspiration comes from Harry Partch. I’ve borrowed his concept of corporeality, the idea that music should reflect and be reflected by the physicality of the human body.
I didn’t, however, use Partch’s 43-note just intonation tuning system. The Pristophone is tuned to the standard 12-tone equal temperament. I believe this suits the communal nature of music; the Pristophone easily fits in with any contemporary classical instrument. One of my goals has been to allow a facility of performance and an acoustical nuance similar to other popular instruments. The tone ranges from gently dulcet to piercingly abrasive, dry to sustained, imperceptibly soft to painfully loud. It is capable of a variety of extended techniques: different mallets and implements, playing harmonics, hand muting, and bowing.
The Pristophone arose out of a deliberate attempt to find new sounds. I believe in using the unfamiliar to shake the listener’s expectations and get closer to the primordial roots of music. Unexpected voices redirect our attention to the qualities of sound itself, making it easier to recognize the prehistoric origins of musical expression. We are allowed a better connection to our physical bodies and our metaphysical selves, which I believe is a fundamental purpose of music.
The project began organically out of my early interest in found objects as percussion, particularly metallophones. In the summer of 2007 I found two stacks of 12-inch saw blades at a local sawmill employee’s garage sale. I bought one of each type. In later months and years, I would troll resale shops and antique stores in search of more blades. I found about half of them through a wanted-to-buy Craigslist ad. Sourcing blades was the most difficult part of the process; it took me ten years to fill in all the missing pitches, and even now I continue to replace saws that don’t quite fit in timbre.
As I experimented with the blades I made a series of discoveries that suggested the possibility that they could be formed into a singular instrument. First I found how to suspend them in order to get a clear sense of pitch. A few months later I learned how and where to drill holes through hardened steel, allowing me to hang them in rows. I tried out different rack systems, first by using gong racks, then by building my own version out of lumber. I soon discovered that the blades are tunable, by blocking the edges with scraps of wood and hammering the center of the blade, making the saw very slightly bell-shaped. This opened up the potential for a large-scale pitched instrument, and I extended the range in both directions.
The limitation of space on the marching rack led me to develop my current system of pitch organization. The twelve pitches in an octave are set in a block, four rows high and three columns wide. Going up one row means going up one half step. One row over is a major third, and three rows over is an octave. In addition to saving space, this system enabled easy playing of tonal harmony, because it places the notes in a triad close to each other.
There were many challenges in building the final version of the Pristophone. It had to be ergonomic, each blade close as possible to the others and easily reachable from a standing position. It had to be durable. It had to be movable. I needed to be able to assemble or disassemble both the Pristophone and Bass Pristophone in an hour, and all the parts had to fit in the back of a van or SUV. The top two octaves had to detach and form a marching instrument that I that could play with brass bands. I needed a damper pedal that could simultaneously stop vibrations on the bottom 2.5 octaves of the instrument.
I designed the Pristophone in two sections. The left section would contain all of the larger saws, with the rails broadening at the left side to accommodate the larger blades. Because many of these blades have a decay time of thirty seconds or more, I planned to build a damper system on the left half. The highest two octaves in the right half are detachable and easily convert into the Marching Pristophone. This smaller set collapses into a pushcart that can be taken on public transit or towed behind a bicycle.
This was intended to be my final build of the Pristophone, so I wanted to make it as durable as possible. I used aluminum for all rails and fittings because, as George Costanza’s father once said, aluminum has the best strength-to-weight ratio. I used Speed Rail fittings, which are great for quick disassembly. Permanent junctures were secured with additional machine bolts.
The Bass Pristophone developed in tandem with the Pristophone. All along, I was finding very large blades that were fundamentally different from the smaller ones in pitch, in timbre, and in the mallets required. I fashioned these blades—14 of them spanning A1 through Bb2—into their own unit. They are arranged in a cage of three sections, allowing the player to reach any of them easily. Pitches are arranged in the circle of fifths left-to-right, facilitating bass lines in tonal music. I designed my own mallets for the instrument made from casters, axe handles, neoprene, and yarn, because there were no commercially available mallets with the mass and reach necessary to play the bass saws.
The Pristophone breaks down into fourteen sections, each 5-8 feet long. There are five rails, four damper bars, three upright posts, and one crossbar. The marching section becomes its own unit. The four rails with saws attached will pack into a single case. The Bass Pristophone has ten large sections: six rails and four posts. The fourteen bass saws are carried separately, though I have plans for devising a better system for moving them.
Thirteen years is a long time to spend on any project, and progress has been gradual. I’ve done what I can, as time and money allows. In the near future of late 2019 I will be restructuring my schedule to give me several days a week in the studio. I will be focusing on an ongoing project of arranging and recording Erik Satie’s piano works for the Pristophone, to be released in 2020. The music is broken into different tracks—between three and fourteen per piece—and each track must be memorized. I will be focusing on composing new works for the instrument. And as always, there are improvements to be made. In the next year I will retune and repaint the instrument and build carrying cases. I am perpetually 97% finished.
