How composer and musician Kris Lennox reimagined the guitar

Lennox, who is 42, and studied music at Strathclyde University and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama, believes that the Parallel-12 is “potentially the greatest disruption to music since the development of Western Harmony”.

At first glance, on a YouTube video that he posted a few weeks ago - the track he plays is entitled Lysis - the Parallel-12 guitar looks much like any other electric. But when it comes to the fret markings on the guitar neck - the markings are essential visual guides for any guitarist - there is a distinct difference.

Conventional guitars have nine markings over their 21 or 22 frets; Lennox’s guitar has markings on virtually all of its 44 frets.

As he explains it, while Western music uses 12 notes in an octave, Parallel-12 is a 24-note division of the octave, and a method of using them.

Parallel-12 treats 24 notes as two layers. The first layer is the traditional 12-tone system of music; the second layer is this same system, but a quarter step higher/lower. Thus, there are two 12-note systems running in parallel to each other.

“Doubling the number of notes desn't just double the possibilities - the possibilities are expanded exponentially”, he writes below the video. “Given 12-tone Western Harmony has proved sufficient for at least 1,000 years … I would estimate that Parallel-12 should provide enough resources to last us at least another 2,000-2,500 years, e.g an entire age/era”.

Amongst the earliest reactions to the video is this one: “This is the most original music I've ever heard. The transitions between harmonies is unexpected but it works. You're the leader of a new frontier”. Another alludes to people’s reactions when Bach’s groundbreaking Well-Tempered compositions during the Late Baroque period, and adds: “I feel the same future from your performance of Parallel-12”.

“For me, the important part isn't the redesign of guitar”, Lennox said in an interview this week, “but rather, the redesign of music, with the guitar being the expression and realisation of this new music”.

The Parallel-12 guitar took nine months to build - its maker was the Northamptonshire-based company, Gordon Smith Guitars - but its evolution of course took well over a decade. The last four years in particular have seen him devote his energies to Parallel-12.

“The actual genesis for it all was in around May 2011, when I had a performance of a piece of my music, called Cave”, Lennox says.

“It was a pre-recorded piece but it was heard [at the Harbour Arts Centre, in Irvine] in pitch blackness. I was trying to break down the barriers between audience and the performer - an issue I have long been disturbed by”.

The show featured electronically-distorted recordings of such equipment as vacuum cleaners. The Health and Safety Executive reportedly sought to ban the show unless Lennox warned the audience at the outset that it could be "potentially dangerous to their health”. Lennox said at the time: "The warning is in part due to the total darkness and in part due to the extreme nature of the music”.

The “ultimate blackness” proved too much for some audience members, who walked out, likening the situation to being confined in a coffin. But its lessons stayed with Lennox.

“At that time I had a spare bedroom, and I built a room within a room, purely as a space to find somewhere silent to record music. But I ended up enjoying the experience of the silence so much that I started reading information about sensory deprivation.

“I thought, I’m going to try a long-term experiment here. So I spent about a month in complete darkness”. At length he learned, among other things, that when his senses are derpived they started to fill in the blanks and create their own perceptions. Faulty source monitoring, it’s called. “Your ears, for example, start to hallucinate sounds, which is a highly unusual experience”, he notes.

Having been “cursed” with perfect pitch since a young age, he now found that he started to perceive pitches that were outwith his normal experience. At length, he began to wonder whether for hundreds of years we have been accustomed to only half of a possible music language. Surely there was potential for our knoweldge to be expanded? The Parallel-12 guitar is, after much experimentation, the outcome of such thought processes.

Quite how radical Lennox sees the new guitar and its possibilities that he describes the instrument as “literally an untapped world”. 

The chords he plays on the guitar, and the chord changes, sound unusual - but only because listeners’ ears have not encountered until now. The harmonic and melodic progressions on Lysis have never been heard before; and the track itself, he believes, is “a reinvention of music as we know it”.

Every single piece of guitar music can be played on the Parallel-12, but conventional guitars can’t replicate its sound. “In this sense”, he says, “Parallel-12 guitars will likely supersede current guitars, as they can do everything a current guitar can - plus more”.

Other instruments are currently being developed, he says. In the meantime? “I would like to get Parallel-12 instruments into as many hands as humanly possible and encourage musicians to write music in this expanded langage”.

Lennox is a noted composer who, some 10 years ago, signed a global publishing deal with Wise Music, which led to the publication of material for the piano or guitar. His piano pieces have also featured in Twenty-Four Contemporary Pieces For Solo Piano, alongside works by Max Richter, Philip Glass and Ludovico Einaudi.

His work on creating a new musical language, and on reinventing gther guitar, is his most ambitious project by some distance.

“If I have a long-term goal”, he says, “it would be for a guitar company and other instrument companies, to commit to building a number of Parallel-12 guitars and to get them in the hands of musicians, at which point a new music could begin to be born”.

* Kris Lennox’s videos can be viewed on YouTube @KrisLennoxMusic