![]() In other words, no more overlapping cheese and anchovies instead, a pizza that is a little less pure.Īs Ll. In this system, known as “equal temperament,” every interval is a little out-of-tune, but nothing sounds too horrible. Modern keyboards use a tuning that smooths out the bumpy edges of the pizza by diving the pie into twelve equal slices. When you add a keyboard to the mix, everything goes sideways because keyboard players aren’t able to continually adjust their intonation. Players get into trouble when harmonizing and need to narrow intervals to stay in tune. For vocalists and for instrumentalists such as violinists and trombonists, who can adjust their intonation on the fly, this intonation produces a sweet, pure sound in the melodic line. The ancient system known as Pythagorean intonation uses mathematically pure fifths and thirds, as described above by Duffin. Either we tune eleven perfect fifths and leave the last one dissonant and unusable, or we compromise the perfection of the fifths and create what is known as a temperament. So, although acoustically pure fifths and acoustically pure major thirds would seem to be desirable sonorities to have in performance, there is no way that either one of them can be completely reconciled to the twelve available pitches of the keyboard octave. The problem is that if we tune fifths that are acoustically pure, the note we arrive at after a circle of twelve fifths will be about one quarter of a semitone sharp to the starting note. We speak of the “circle of fifths,” that procedure whereby, starting on any note and going up or down in series by the interval of a fifth, eventually we arrive at a note with the same name as the one we started on. Imagine the twelve tones of a true chromatic scale as clock, or maybe an oozy pizza, in which twelve slices almost, but don’t quite fit.Īs Ross Duffin writes in his chapter “Tuning and Temperament” in Jeffery Kite-Powell’s A Performer’s Guide to Renaissance Music: For the rest of us, in simple terms, the drama comes down to an unsolvable problem of math. If you fancy a deep dive into the physics of music, check out the links below you will not be disappointed. To understand why the manuscript was so revolutionary back in 1722, and why 300 years later it continues to foment controversy among baroque music aficionados, we need to keep in mind that the baroque keyboards were tuned differently than today’s pianos. While completely playable on modern pianos, The Well-Tempered Clavier would have been impossible to perform on keyboards of Bach’s time-not without a radical new approach to tuning the very instruments it was written for. But the simplicity of the concept belies the audacity of its origin. Indeed, that’s how the book functions today for contemporary concert pianists and students of piano. As they work their way through the book, students practice all the key signatures sequentially. Then C# major and minor, then D and so forth, all the way through B minor. ![]() Next, a prelude and fugue in the parallel key, C minor. To modern sensibilities, a systematic book for aspiring keyboard students seems like a sensible pedagogical project sprung from an orderly mind: start in C major with prelude and fugue. (More on that later.) A German clavichord from 1763 via Wikimedia CommonsĪs for what Bach meant by “well-tempered”- a clue is in the structure of the volume. ![]() He did not mean the modern piano as we know it, the very instrument upon which The Well-Tempered Clavier is played most often now, because modern pianos had yet to evolve. There’s now consensus that when Bach wrote “ Das Wohltemperirte Clavier ,” he meant “clavier” to signify any musical keyboard-harpsichord, clavichord, organ. The second is easier to answer than the first: Over the years, partisans for various ancient keyboard instruments have tried to claim The Well-Tempered Clavier for themselves, including the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni, who misnamed the collection “ ’Das Wohltemperierte Clavichord ,” and the famous twentieth-century Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who insisted the pieces were meant for her instrument, only. ![]() For more than a century, early music specialists have been sparring over these very questions. What’s so “well-tempered” about this clavier? And, what’s a “clavier,” in the first place? Is it a sort of old-fashioned piano on Prozac? If you’ve been wondering, you’re in good company. There’s now consensus that when Bach wrote “ Das Wohltemperirte Clavier,” he meant “clavier” to signify any musical keyboard-harpsichord, clavichord, organ. ![]()
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