Tuning: At the Crossroads

Abstract

The arena of musical scales and tuning has certainly not been a quiet place to be for the past three hundred years. But it might just as well have been if we judge by the results: the same 12/2 equally tempered scale established then as the best available tuning compromise, by J. S. Bach and many others (Helmholtz 1954; Apel 1972), remains to this day essentially the only scale heard in Western music. That monopoly crosses all musical styles, from the most contemporary of jazz and avantgarde classical, and musical masterpieces from the past, to the latest technopop rock with fancy synthesizers, and everywhere in between. Instruments of the symphony orchestra attempt with varying degrees of success to live up to the 100-cent semitone, even though many would find it inherently far easier to do otherwise: the strings to lapse into Pythagorean tuning, the brass into several keys of Just intonation (Barbour 1953). And these easily might do so were it not for the constant viligance on the part of performers, and the readily available yardsticks for equal temperament provided by the woodwinds to some extent, but more so by the harp, organ, or omnipresent piano (inexact standards that they may in truth be). Yet this apparent lack of adventurousness is not due to any lack of good alternatives (Olson 1967; Backus 1977; Lloyd and Boyle 1979; Bateman 1980; Balzano 1980) or their champions. Indeed an experienced musician would have to be preposterously naive, sheltered, and deaf (!) not to have encountered at least a name or two like Yasser (1975) or Partch (1979), or in an earlier era, Bosanquet, White, Brown, or General Thompson (Helmholtz 1954; Partch 1979). These pioneers were certainly not known for their shy reticence on behalf of their various tuning reform proposals. Nearly all built or