Well Temperament

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 15: Well Temperament

Before equal temperament there were the well temperaments — Werckmeister, Kirnberger, Vallotti, Young — systems in which the twelve semitones of the octave were not equal but unequal, the fifths not uniformly narrowed but variably narrowed, some fifths purer than others, some thirds sweeter than others, some keys luminous and resonant and others clouded and rough, each key having a character, a color, a personality that changed as you moved around the circle of fifths, the bright keys becoming less bright, the dark keys becoming darker, the piano not a democracy of pitch but a kingdom, some keys favored and some disfavored, and the disfavoring was not a flaw but a feature, was the price paid for the favoring, the sacrifice that made the beauty possible.

Clara knew the well temperaments the way a modern architect knows the cathedrals — as history, as heritage, as the tradition from which the present practice descended. She had studied them in the PTG examination materials, had read about Werckmeister III and its eight pure fifths and four narrow fifths, had read about Kirnberger III and its approach to just intonation in the most common keys, had understood, intellectually, the argument for unequal temperament, the argument that the color and character of individual keys was a musical resource that equal temperament destroyed, that the uniform impurity of equal temperament was a kind of grayness, a flattening of the landscape, the acoustic equivalent of painting every room the same beige.

She had never set a well temperament on a client's piano. No client had ever asked for one. The well temperaments were historical curiosities, studied by scholars and performed by early-music specialists on harpsichords and fortepianos, instruments that predated the modern piano and that existed in a world where C major and F-sharp major were not interchangeable, where the choice of key was not arbitrary but meaningful, where a composer chose D major for its brightness or B-flat major for its warmth or F-sharp major for its strangeness, the key itself carrying a character that the music inhabited.

Equal temperament erased these characters. Equal temperament said: all keys are the same. D major and F-sharp major and B-flat major are identical in their interval structure, identical in their beat rates, identical in their quality. The only difference is the frequency, the pitch level, the height on the scale. The character is gone. The color is gone. The personality is gone. What remains is function — the ability to play in any key, to modulate to any key, to transpose to any key, without encountering the rough intervals, the wolf tones, the acoustic nausea that the well temperaments produced in their disfavored keys.

Clara was sitting in her living room on a Sunday evening in August, not tuning, not working, sitting in the chair by the window with a book in her lap — a book about the history of temperament, a book she had read before, years ago, when she was learning, and that she had taken from the shelf today without a clear reason, without a specific question she wanted answered, or perhaps with a question she had not yet articulated, a question that was forming in the way that sounds form in a piano's soundboard, the vibration beginning before the sound, the energy present before the perception.

The book was by a musicologist named Stuart Isacoff, and the chapter Clara was reading was about the debate, in the eighteenth century, between the proponents of meantone temperament and the proponents of equal temperament, a debate that was not just technical but philosophical, not just about tuning but about values, about what mattered more — the beauty of the pure interval or the versatility of the tempered interval, the perfection of the few or the adequacy of the all, the cathedral or the democracy.

The proponents of meantone argued that the pure major third — the interval with a frequency ratio of 5:4, the interval that produced no beats, that was consonant, that was the sound of the overtone series itself, the sound of nature — was so beautiful, so satisfying, so right, that it was worth sacrificing the usability of certain keys to preserve it. The pure third in C major was worth the wolf fifth in G-sharp major. The beauty was worth the cost.

The proponents of equal temperament argued that no interval should be sacrificed for any other, that all keys should be equally usable, that the beauty of the pure third was a luxury that practical music-making could not afford, that a piano that could play in all twelve keys with equal competence was more valuable than a piano that could play in six keys with beauty and six with ugliness.

The debate was resolved, eventually, in favor of equal temperament, resolved not by argument but by practice, by the gradual adoption of equal temperament by tuners and pianists and composers who found, in its uniformity, a freedom that the well temperaments did not provide — the freedom to modulate without restriction, to explore the full circle of fifths, to write music that moved through all twelve keys with equal ease, and this freedom was, Clara thought, genuinely valuable, was not a compromise in the pejorative sense but a trade, a conscious exchange of one good for another, the good of beauty for the good of freedom.

But the trade had a cost. The cost was the loss of character, the loss of the individual voice of each key, the loss of the pure interval that the ear recognized as consonant, as resolved, as right, and this loss was permanent, was built into the system, was not a flaw to be fixed but a feature to be accepted, and the acceptance was the equal temperament's demand — accept the impurity, accept the compromise, accept that correct is not pure and pure is not correct, and in return you will have a piano that plays everything equally well, which means everything equally imperfectly.

Clara set the book down and looked at the Knabe, which was across the room, its fallboard closed, its top panel closed, the piano sealed, silent, containing its two hundred and thirty strings and its eighty-eight keys and its equal temperament, the grid of compromises that Clara had set on it and that would drift and be reset and drift again, the cycle of tuning and detuning that was the piano's life, the endless adjustment, the perpetual correction.

She thought about her hearing. She thought about the audiogram. She thought about the curve that was descending, the frequencies that were fading, the cents that were blurring. She thought about the well temperaments and their unequal distribution of beauty and ugliness, and she thought that her hearing was becoming a kind of well temperament — some frequencies clear and beautiful, other frequencies clouded and rough, the distribution unequal, the character of her hearing changing as you moved up the frequency spectrum, the lower frequencies still luminous and resonant, the upper frequencies increasingly dark.

In a well temperament, the dark keys were avoided. Composers wrote around them, chose other keys, stayed in the territory where the tuning was favorable. In Clara's hearing, the dark frequencies were the frequencies above 6,000 hertz, and Clara was writing around them — using the Korg, relying on Yuki, leaning closer, striking harder — was avoiding the territory where her tuning was unfavorable, was staying in the range where her ear was still luminous and resonant.

But what if she stopped avoiding. What if she accepted the dark frequencies the way a well-temperament composer accepted the dark keys — not as a deficiency but as a character, not as a loss but as a quality, not as something to be avoided but as something to be used. What would it mean to tune with a well-tempered ear rather than an equally tempered ear, to accept that some frequencies were clear and others were not, to let the hearing's unevenness be part of the tuning rather than a flaw in it.

This was not a practical thought. This was not a plan. A tuner could not choose which frequencies to hear, could not compose around the deficiencies the way a composer could compose around the wolf tones. A tuner had to tune all the notes, all the octaves, all the frequencies, and the tuning had to be correct in all of them, not just the ones where the ear was favorable. The analogy broke down at the practical level, the way all analogies broke down, the metaphor reaching the limit of its usefulness, the point where the comparison illuminated and then the point where it obscured.

But the thought persisted. The thought that the hearing loss was not just a subtraction but a transformation, not just a diminishment but a change in character, and the change in character was — Clara tested the thought, pressed on it, listened to it the way she listened to a temperament, checking for consistency — the change in character was real. Her hearing was different now, not just less. She heard the piano differently. She heard the bass more prominently, the mid-range more clearly, the treble less sharply. The piano's voice, as received by Clara's ear, had shifted — the balance between registers had changed, the relative weight of bass and treble had changed, the emphasis had moved from the upper frequencies to the lower, and this shift was a change in the character of her perception, a recoloring.

Was the recoloring bad. The question was both absurd and essential. Of course it was bad — the hearing loss prevented Clara from doing the finest work of her craft, prevented her from hearing the beats in the upper treble, prevented her from tuning the top octave by ear, prevented her from being the tuner she had been. But was the recoloring only bad. Was there nothing in the new hearing, the hearing with the diminished treble and the prominent bass, that was valuable, that was worth attending to, that offered a perception of the piano that the old hearing, with its full frequency range, had not offered.

Clara went to the Knabe. She opened the fallboard and sat on the bench and played a chord — D-flat major, the key that in Werckmeister III was one of the darker keys, one of the keys whose thirds were wide and whose fifths were slightly rough — and the chord rang in the room in equal temperament, the same impurity as every other key, the same beat rate, the same compromise, and Clara listened to the chord and heard it the way her ear now heard chords, with the prominent bass and the clear mid-range and the softer treble, and the hearing was — she listened with attention, with the quality of listening she brought to tuning, the quality that was not passive but active, the ear reaching for the sound — the hearing was warm. The chord was warm. The bass was present in a way that gave the chord weight, gravity, a quality of rootedness, the low notes anchoring the harmony the way a foundation anchors a house, and the treble was present but recessed, was part of the chord but not the dominant part, was supporting rather than leading, and the balance was different from the balance Clara had heard when her hearing was full, was warmer, was darker, was — she searched for the word — was more bass.

More bass. The world was becoming more bass. Mrs. Ashford had said that Douglas had said this, that his hearing loss had made the world more bass, and Douglas had been describing the same phenomenon that Clara was now experiencing, the shift in perceived balance that occurred when the high frequencies receded and the low frequencies remained, the recoloring, the change in character.

Clara played the chord again. She played it and listened to the warmth, to the weight, to the bass that her hearing now emphasized, and she thought about the well temperaments and their characters and their colors and their deliberate inequalities, and she thought that perhaps — perhaps — there was a way to hear the hearing loss not as a departure from equal temperament, from the uniform, democratic distribution of hearing across all frequencies, but as a departure toward well temperament, toward a hearing that had character, that had color, that was unequal in ways that were not only limiting but also, in some register, in some quality, revealing.

This was a dangerous thought. A seductive thought. A thought that could lead Clara to rationalize the loss, to romanticize it, to make it into something it was not — a gift, a blessing, a new way of hearing that was better than the old way — and Clara was not a person who romanticized, was not a person who converted difficulties into opportunities, was a person who dealt in facts, in measurements, in the audible and the quantifiable, and the fact was that the hearing loss was a loss, was a diminishment, was a decrease in the ear's capacity to do the work it needed to do.

But the thought was also true, in a limited way, in a specific register. The hearing was changing, and the change was not only loss. The change was also a new way of hearing, a way that emphasized some aspects of the sound and de-emphasized others, and the emphasis was not arbitrary but systematic, was the product of the ear's physical condition, and the systematic emphasis produced a hearing that was — Clara conceded this carefully, reluctantly, the way you concede a point in an argument that you are losing — that was its own thing. Not the old hearing. Not a lesser hearing. A different hearing.

She closed the fallboard. She sat on the bench and looked at the book on the chair by the window, the book about temperament, and she thought about the debate between meantone and equal temperament, and she thought that the debate was never really resolved, was not a question that had an answer but a tension that had a history, the tension between beauty and function, between character and uniformity, between the pure interval and the versatile interval, and the tension was present in every equal-tempered piano, in every correctly tempered fifth that was slightly narrow, in every correctly tempered third that was slightly wide, the tension between what the ear wanted — the pure interval, the consonance, the resolution — and what the system required — the tempered interval, the compromise, the function.

The tension was present in Clara's hearing now. The tension between what her ear wanted — the full frequency range, the undiminished perception, the hearing she had had — and what her ear provided — the diminished range, the changed perception, the hearing she now had. And the question, the question she had been circling for months, the question that the audiogram posed and the Korg confirmed and the Steinway tested and Mrs. Ashford addressed and Martin witnessed — the question was not how to eliminate the tension but how to live with it. How to tune with it. How to work within the temperament that her ear now imposed, the unequal temperament of presbycusis, the system in which some keys were clear and others were dark, and the dark keys could not be avoided because the work required all the keys, and the work was the thing, the work was the only thing, the work was what Clara had.

She went to the kitchen and struck the fork.

A440. The reference. The fixed point. The one pitch that did not change, that was not affected by the temperament, that was the same in meantone and Werckmeister and equal temperament and every other system that humans had devised, because A440 was not a relationship but a frequency, not an interval but a pitch, not a compromise but a fact, and the fact was the same regardless of the system, regardless of the ear, regardless of the hearing loss, regardless of everything.

Clara held the fork and listened to it decay and thought about what she would decide. Not whether to stop — that question was not yet ripe, was not yet ready to be asked, because the hearing was still sufficient for most of the work, was still right enough for the temperaments and the octaves and the unisons in the vast middle of the keyboard — but what to do, how to work, how to adapt, how to continue.

She could continue as she was — tuning by ear in the frequencies where her ear was reliable and using the Korg in the frequencies where it was not, the hybrid approach, the combination of human perception and electronic measurement that produced tunings that were correct in all registers, that were right enough, that satisfied the clients and served the music.

She could bring Yuki more fully into the work — not just the top octave on the concert pianos but the top octave on all the pianos, Yuki accompanying her on every tuning, the two of them working together, Clara's experience and Yuki's hearing combining to produce tunings that were better than either could produce alone.

She could try the hearing aids. The aids that Dr. Chau had described, the digital amplifiers that would boost the frequencies above 6,000 hertz, that might restore some of the resolution she had lost, that might bring back some of the cents, at the cost of introducing artifacts, distortion, the electronic coloration that would be present in exactly the frequencies where coloration was most harmful.

She could stop. She could do what Leonard had done — put down the lever, pass the bag, step back from the bench, leave the piano to the next ear. She could stop and the stopping would be clean, would be dignified, would be the Leonard solution, the tuning fork solution — one pitch, one frequency, one truth, no ambiguity.

She did not want to stop.

The not-wanting was not denial. The not-wanting was not the refusal of a person who cannot accept the reality. The not-wanting was the preference of a person who loved the work, who was still capable of most of the work, who had found ways to compensate for the parts of the work she could no longer do alone, and who saw, in the compensations, not a defeat but an adaptation, not a retreat but a change, and the change was difficult and the adaptation was imperfect and the work was not what it had been, but the work was still work, was still tuning, was still the act of listening and correcting that had organized Clara's life for twenty-eight years.

She set the fork on the table. She went to the window and looked out at the August evening, the long light, the late sunset, the city in its summer ease, and she listened to the sounds of the evening — the birds, the traffic, the children playing in a yard somewhere nearby, the sounds that her ear delivered to her with the reliability and the color and the character that her ear currently possessed, the sounds that were her world, the acoustic landscape that she inhabited, and the landscape was different from the landscape she had inhabited a year ago, was warmer, was darker, was more bass, but it was still a landscape, was still rich, was still full of information and beauty and the particular quality of being alive in a world that made sound.

She would not stop. Not yet. Not tonight.

She would continue. She would adapt. She would use the Korg and bring Yuki and lean closer and strike harder and do whatever the ear required her to do to continue doing the work, and the work would be different, would be the work of a tuner with a well-tempered ear rather than an equally tempered ear, a tuner whose hearing had character and color and inequality, and the inequality was not a virtue but it was a fact, and facts were what Clara worked with, and she would work with this fact the way she worked with every piano's inharmonicity — by hearing it, by accommodating it, by tuning through it, by making the compromise that the reality demanded so that the piano could play in all keys, so that the music could continue, so that the tuning could hold.

She went to bed. The August night was warm and she slept with the windows open, and the sounds of the city came through the windows and entered her sleep, the city's frequencies mixing with the silence of the frequencies she could no longer hear, the heard and the unheared coexisting in the room, in the air, in Clara's sleeping ears, and the coexistence was not peace exactly but it was coexistence, was the thing before peace, was the accommodation that might, over time, become the acceptance that might, over more time, become the thing that Mrs. Ashford had called "right enough."

Right enough.

Clara slept.