You are
about to enter the Twilight Zone. I submit for your consideration an oddly
named book lying on an ordinary desk: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should
Care), by professor Ross W. Duffin. This book was written by a madman. Or
is he? You should understand: If Duffin is mad, he's not alone. And the
spaces between the lines of his book are filled with the silent laughter of the
gods.
The
gods are laughing at their little joke on musicians. When it comes to the
tuning of instruments, especially keyboards and fretted instruments, nature
drops a giant hairball in our path.
From
a review by Jan Swafford
at Slate (Matt Yglesias gives the short
version for non-musicians). I wonder
whether Duffin writes about the normalization of jazz harmonies by English
performers in Broadway-derived musicals, which can be very strange if you know
the originals well.
You
can play a keyboard instrument that isn’t tuned in equal temperament. What you usually can’t do easily is choose
your tuning on the spur of the moment (which is possible playing string
instruments like violins, and even playing wind instruments, but not the
standard piano). An English musician
named Geoff Smith, however, has invented a piano with “fluid tuning,” which you
can see and listen to here. It’s expected to be very useful especially
for non-Western genres, and certainly looks pretty neat.
Comments