In May 1922, Marie Lippelt of Central College, Iowa, wrote two letters to Arthur Fickenscher, urging him to invest in the construction of a new polytonal keyboard. Developed by the University of Leipzig Institute of Psychology, the keyboard was designed to have 144 tones in total—36 per octave—allowing for perfect intonation in all 12 keys. While other polytonal keyboards existed at the time, this project was unique in its inclusion of more tones per octave and its emphasis on practicality, with the ability to temporarily eliminate certain tones depending on the key of performance. To cover production costs, they needed a significant number of orders and believed that every state university should have a polytonal keyboard (including UVA, where Fickenscher was head of the music department). Although I don’t have access to Mr. Fickenscher’s responses, it seems likely he was resistant to the idea, as Lippelt’s second letter, sent a week and a half later, is notably more insistent. In the conclusion of her second letter she writes, “I would heartily invite you to participate so to say in the birth of this wonder-instrument, for which the world has been waiting for centuries” (1922).

Just 20 years later, mathematician and music enthusiast E.V. Huntington contacted Fickenscher with a similar desire to reshape the future of musical education—this time by simplifying musical notation. Both Fickenscher and Huntington had independently developed remarkably similar chromatic staff systems. Fickenscher noted that he was first introduced to this method by a “Japanese friend” (1942) who used it to preserve traditional melodies. He also wrote that a music teacher friend of his had found that teaching students with a chromatic staff system was far more efficient and intuitive. Fickenscher ended his letter with, “I trust that some day your idea of a saner musical notation will be adopted” (1942). Over 80 years later, this has yet to happen. Why has Western musical notation remained the dominant system, and should it?

At the time, Fickenscher and Huntington were not alone in advocating for changes to musical notation. In their exchange, Fickenscher briefly mentioned Ferruccio Busoni, a revered Italian composer who also believed pitches should be notated chromatically. However, Busoni had an even broader vision for musical reform. He considered Western music notation outdated and argued that it should evolve alongside music itself. His "organic keyboard" idea differentiated white and black keys by using white and black note heads. While his methods had limitations, his belief that notation itself serves as an artistic statement remains a compelling idea.

Australian-born composer Percy Grainger, a passionate admirer of Fickenscher’s work, also experimented with new forms of musical notation, particularly in his compositions for the Theremin. His notation system used graph paper to convey pitch contours and volume changes rather than exact pitches. Much of Grainger’s work was driven by his pursuit of “free music” (Garlette 2022), which aimed to break free from traditional constraints of rhythm and pitch, drawing inspiration from the sounds of nature. In 1932, he wrote to Fickenscher, congratulating him on his polytone keyboard and praising it as an essential tool for advancing free music.

While all these figures aimed to create new staff systems, their motivations differed, and some have stood the test of time better than others. One of Busoni’s core beliefs was that musical notation should be more expressive and carry more detailed information for the musician. He emphasized the loss of information between an original performance, its notation, and its later recreation. In his essay A New Esthetic of Music, he wrote, “again, the performance of a work is also a transcription, and still, whatever liberties it may take, it can never annihilate the original” (1907). What I find interesting is that he never references recording devices, yet in many ways, music recordings do have the potential to “annihilate” the original. Busoni’s highly specific notation system has largely become obsolete in an era of high-quality audio recordings. For example, jazz transcriptions almost never reflect the exact nuances of a live performance. Instead, jazz musicians typically rely on lead sheets that provide a simplified melody, while devoting equal, if not more, time to listening to recordings of accomplished players and replicating their sound. Given the accessibility and accuracy of modern recordings, it’s unsurprising that Busoni’s hyper-detailed notation methods have not gained widespread adoption.

A more compelling reason to revise Western music notation is its incompatibility with microtonal compositions. If a flexible chromatic staff were developed, as Huntington and Fickenscher suggested, it could open up a vast range of musical possibilities. It would allow for more efficient notation of pure-tone compositions and provide greater accuracy in representing the microtonal tuning systems of various musical traditions, such as the Indian system, which divides an octave into 22 intervals.

Despite these potential benefits, the widespread adoption of a chromatic staff has not occurred for several reasons. One possibility is that altering a staff system to better accommodate music from other cultures requires a level of humility and respect that many musicians and theorists of the time may have lacked. Borrowing elements from foreign music for one’s own compositions is one thing; fundamentally changing one’s method of notation to faithfully preserve another culture’s sound is quite another. Colonialism undoubtedly played a role in this mindset that is to exploit foreign music while refusing to regard it as equally valuable as European music.

While this seemed to be the prevailing attitude, some individuals did make efforts to preserve music more accurately. One example is the Indian Harmonium, patented by Keatley Moore in 1912, which aimed to “save India from complete 7-White-5-Black corruption” (Partch 1949). Though it was not a significant commercial success, it demonstrates that some saw foreign musical traditions as worthy of careful preservation. Unfortunately, such efforts were the exception rather than the norm.

Another factor in the chromatic staff’s lack of adoption is that many musical traditions employing microtones are primarily transmitted orally rather than through written notation. Given this, it may not be practical to develop a notation system for them when they were never intended to be written down in the first place.

Despite the predictions of Fickenscher, Grainger, and Marie Lippelt, pure-tone music has not gained the popularity they envisioned. While limitations in notation and the absence of a practical polytonal keyboard may have hindered its widespread adoption, technological advancements may change this in the future. Digital instruments could provide greater flexibility; while I’m not aware of any pure-tone synthesizers, such a development would likely be far more practical and feasible than Fickenscher’s mechanical keyboard.

Bibliography

Lippelt, Marie. 1922. “Correspondence, Polytone Related.” Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Accessed 13 Feb. 2025.

Huntington, Edward. 1942. “Correspondence, Polytone Related.” Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Accessed 13 Feb. 2025.

Partch, Harry. 1949. “Genesis of a Music.” University of Wisconsin Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/426238

Busoni, Feruccio. 1907. “Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music.”

Garlette, William “Grainger and Irregular Meters.” Percy Grainger Society, 18 Apr. 2022, percygrainger.org/blog/12712906.