How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) by Ross W. Duffin

Author:Ross W. Duffin [Duffin, Ross W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-10-17T02:00:00+00:00

Hermann von Helmholtz, ca. 1885. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

From this gratifyingly detailed account we learn of the gradual introduction of ET into England around 1850, first for pianos, then for organs. Although Ellis found meantone organs in general use in Spain and in scattered use throughout England around 1880, he could still describe ET as “firmly established” in 1883. “Firmly established” is, of course, not the same thing as a universal standard. I remember being startled, many years ago, hearing fortepiano collector E. Michael Frederick say that he possessed tuning instructions by someone in the Erard piano firm from around 1910, and that the temperament described was not ET. I used to tell people that story and they would always ask, “Really? What was it?” For a long time I never knew. I finally contacted Mike and Patricia Frederick for the reference, which turned out to be an article on the piano in the Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire of 1913, written by Alphonse Blondel. Blondel had become head of the Erard piano firm in 1873, and in that 1913 article the tuning he recommended as “harmonious and possessed of a charm which makes plain the natural qualities of the instrument” was one that used five tempered fifths and seven pure ones, much the same kind of building blocks for a temperament as irregular systems from the eighteenth century. Since the five tempered fifths were tuned alike, we can determine that they were narrow by about one-fifth of a comma. Blondel’s approach was different from most historical temperaments, however, since he interspersed tempered and pure fifths in the series, rather than concentrating most of the tempered fifths in a row in order to favor those keys. There were historical precedents for such a system, however, since in 1790 theorist and composer Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg had described a temperament with alternating tempered and pure fifths, though using six of each rather than five tempered and seven pure fifths.* And there is evidence that temperaments like that were used in practice well into the twentieth century. Not all early piano recordings are clear enough and free enough from wow and flutter to allow frequency analysis, but the May 26, 1924, recording of Chopin’s Prélude op. 28, no. 15 in D by Chopin specialist Vladimir de Pachmann† seems clearly to reveal a temperament based on such an alternation of narrow and wide fifths.

So while ET was, to use Ellis’s term, “firmly established,” we can hardly describe it as the only thing that musicians were using, even into the twentieth century. We may further question whether the temperament people were describing as ET in the nineteenth century was really ET. Indeed, Owen Jorgensen, one of today’s leading authorities on historical temperaments, regards 1917 as the “before and after” date in the history of temperament:

Alexander Ellis

Alexander J. Ellis (né John Sharpe), the English philologist and mathematician, was born in Hoxton, near London, on June 14, 1814, and died in London on October 28, 1890.

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