Why question equal temperament and the traditional acoustic piano?

“In a healthy culture differing musical philosophies would be coexistent, not mutually exclusive; and they would build from Archean granite”. (Harry Partch, A Genesis of Music. preface xvii)

Both from a compositional and performative perspective, I’ve had a growing need for greater timbral and pitch expressivity. In a sense, I’ve been searching for new sonic landscapes that challenge my expectations, limitations and perceptions. 

In some ways, 12-tone equal temperament can be likened to a clock. A clock is quantitative, rather than qualitative in that it consists of 12 equidistant numbers representing hours of the day. One can recall Descarte’s mechanistic, clockwork universe and how these enlightenment ideas, to this day, pervade and largely shape who we are and how we view the world around us. In contrast, bell-time, of say Medieval Europe, could be compared to microtonal organizations and a qualitative systems of organization and “being in the world”. Bells lack the precision, automation and regularity of clocks and yet find more embodied connection points to surrounding nature and the way the human society may organize itself. Bells were, and continue to be markers for important events including births, rites of passage, weddings and death rituals. It’s important for me as an artist to confront and pose questions about this largely quantitative mechanistic world view that philosophically permeates many aspects of our lives. It is, for instance, important for me to evoke the sounds of bells or gongs on my microtonal prepared piano for they represent this needed attention towards qualitative, present moment-focus and embodied states of being.

“Many different dialects and vocabularies have been faded out in favour of a certain linguistic style that has been chosen by a specific class.”  (Khyam Allami)  (6)

It’s safe to say that the most prominent tuning system of the world today is what we call equal temperament. The tuning system was developed in Central Europe in the early 17th century, within the realm of western art music. Western classical music had the purpose of trying to resolve some compositional problems for a specific class of composers. It was funded by a specific class in society to have more creative freedom for those composer in question, and slowly became the standard. And that system, 12-tone equal temperament, is inherited within western music theory and all the digital tools that we now have at our disposal. It has therefor become the predominant tuning and musical system across the globe and in the majority of musical instruments.

At the same time, Allami reminds us that “we’ve come to believe that equal temperament is embedded within Western instruments and Western music, but it really never was.” (6) For instance, string players gravitate towards perfect intervals and often cite the difficulty of playing with equally tempered instruments, namely the piano. At the same rate, the piano only closely approximates equal temperament. There is clearly a discrepancy between practice and theory, and my confrontation simply questions dogmatic, rigid and even colonial aspects of equal temperament.

From a historical perspective, it’s worth noting that many scholars, including Kenneth Robinson, believe Chinese mathematician Chu Tsai-yü was first to formulate 12 equal temperament anywhere in the world. (7) This clearly calls into question any sort of western ownership or “crusading”.

From another angle, a tuning system can be likened to a spoken language or even dialect. Wade Davis describes language as “an old growth forest of the mind” (8)

He continues…“And just as the biosphere, the biological matrix of life, is today being severely compromised, so too is the ethnosphere (definition). No biologist, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species of plant and animal are moribund or on the brink of extinction. Yet this, the most apocalyptic projection in the realm of biological diversity, scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. The key indicator is language loss. There are at present some 6,000 languages. But of these fully half are not being taught to children. Which means that effectively, unless something changes, these languages are already dead”. (9)

In an ever globalized world, I think it important to recognize this cultural trend and support the preservation of “languages” across disciplines as well as promoting new cultural diversity in spite of trends toward monoculture within Davis’ ethnosphere. A tuning system is a kind of language that, in a myriad of ways, can express the human spirit’s proclivity for musical creativity.

So is equal temperament an expression of colonialism in today's musical and sociopolitical landscape? I at least don’t feel there is a need for promoting limits on human creativity. Should pianos in say, Damascus, be tuned in equal temperament when there exists great varieties of  maqams - Arabic microtonal melodic modes - to choose from? 

(7) Kenneth Robinson: A critical study of Chu Tsai-yü's contribution to the theory of equal temperament in Chinese music. (Sinologica Coloniensia, Bd. 9.) x, 136 pp. Wiesbaden