Who invented equal temperament

More importantly, though, other than pitch, nothing distinguishes the various keys. The well temperaments used throughout the 17 and 18 hundreds also allow one to modulate amongst different keys. However, the octave is not divided into equal steps. Rather, some semi tones are smaller and some are larger. Overall, perfect fifths tend to be pretty close, while the quality of major thirds varies around the circle of fifths, with the more unstable major thirds tending to fall on the black keys, giving the various keys different characteristics.

Composers of the 17 and 18 hundreds used this in their music. When we listen to their music in our modern equal temperament, we are not hearing their harmonic intentions.

Key color has been lost. Who's responsible for promoting this conspiracy? Music conservatories who have blindly been repeating the equal temperament dogma. The Piano Technician's Guild- modern piano tuners typically are only trained in tuning equal temperament. If you don't believe me, you can read more about it in Owen Jorgensen's encyclopedic work: 'Tuning. He provides ample historical and scientific evidence for these ideas.

The library call number for this masterpiece is MT J What should you do if you want to play the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, etc the way it was intended?

Find a competent piano tuner who knows how to tune historic well temperaments! This is what I am doing. I called over 20 tuners before I found one who could tune anything besides equal temperament.

I recommend calling piano tuners that work for a university since they seem to be more knowledgeable about historic tunings. In Austin, I recommend Charles Ball. I will have my piano tuned to Thomas Young's well temperament.

In my interview with the Hilliards, Rogers Covey-Crump describes the difficulties the group had in maintaining music by Orlande de Lassus at a stable pitch until — bingo! Which meant sharpened fourths. And with the fourths duly sharpened, the tuning problems went away. Baroque tuning systems tend to have labels like that.

But all these systems boiled down to scratching the same itch — ideas often governed by need, taste or circumstance of how best to carve up the basic octave as conceptualised by Pythagoras. And Just Intonation emphasises bright, booming perfect thirds, but the way the maths works out, that means the fifth between D and A is pushed out of tune. Equal temperament pretends you can have it both ways; Just Intonation makes a conscious choice about which intervals matter most.

Lou Harrison, and fellow travellers like La Monte Young, Tony Conrad and Terry Riley, have variously equated the impact of equal temperament on sound with nuclear war, the cloned homogenisation of globalisation and destruction of the natural environment.

We need to be aware not only if notes are in tune, but also whether the system in which those notes have been tuned is appropriate — whether music is in tune with us. The notes of a tempered scale are just a little off the natural harmonics of vibrating strings.

They're slightly out of tune. At least they are when you compare them with natural harmonics. That's the bad news, but it's not very bad. The difference is so small that most of us can barely hear it.

The good news is that equal temperament lets you transpose freely on a fixed-pitch instrument. If you didn't have it, you'd be able to play a piano accurately in only one key. That's a tradeoff most modern musicians are willing to make. At first, equal temperament threw two groups into passionate opposition. Purists like the composer Giuseppe Tartini were violently opposed to it. The practical Johann Sebastian Bach was equally intense in promoting it.

His great polemic for equal temperament was, of course, his book of keyboard pieces with varied key signatures. It was The Well-Tempered Clavier.