O.K., Everyone in Tune, Whatever That Means

NY Times, March 14, 1999
O.K., Everyone in Tune, Whatever That Means

By ANNE E. JOHNSON

The strings of a harpsichord, an old joke has it,
will stay in tune for only 19 seconds. Most
early-music concerts on period instruments feature
a lot of tuning, sometimes to the point of making the
audience squirm. Why the instruments go out of tune
is no mystery. Materials like wood and gut are highly
sensitive to temperature and humidity. The bigger
riddle is what, exactly, it means to be in tune.

Tuning is a central but seldom discussed part of
the early-music movement. There is little doubt that music
of the early Baroque was played with a different
system of tuning (or "temperament") than is common
today. The difference it makes to the music can be
hard to pin down, but musicians agree that even to
listeners who can't describe it, the harmonies will
sound unfamiliar if not outright strange.

Baroque zealots tend to disdain modern, or "equal,"
temperament, suggesting that every note is "equally out
of tune." Their ears have become accustomed to unequal
temperaments. The challenge is to convince fellow
musicians to learn to use and appreciate those tuning
systems. Audiences, too, sometimes show resistance.

In the early 17th century the ideal was to have the third,
an important note in a major chord, sound acoustically "pure."
This was called "mean tone" temperament. To modern ears,
"pure" often translates as "out of tune," when a chord is
compared with its counterpart in equal temperament. On the
other hand, once the ear is used to the pure thirds of mean
tone, that major chord gives a wonderful sense of repose.
At the same time, other mean-tone chords sound wildly
dissonant, giving the music great energy. Neither
effect is possible in equal temperament, which has no pure
intervals at all.

Musicians who have explored historical temperaments come
to feel strongly about them. As a member of the Baroque
trio Romanesca, the English violinist Andrew Manze recently
astounded Americans with his inspired playing of the
17th-century "stylus phantasticus" repertory. Mr. Manze's
mastery of the nuances of tuning was obvious in the group's
New York debut concert at Weill Recital Hall.

Mr. Manze finds it natural to play in Baroque temperaments.
"On a violin, if you put your fingers on the neck without
effort, it's mean tone," he said. "The fingers end up being
farther apart than we're usually trained for."

Surely the most famous mention of a musical "temperament"
is in the title of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier." The
late 17th and the 18th centuries produced a variety of
temperaments that stretched the thirds and fifths of
chords to varying degrees, approaching the idea of modern
equal temperament. Even in Bach's day, "well tempered"
was different from "equal."

"On a well-tempered keyboard, you could play in all keys
more or less acceptably," said Raymond Erickson,
a musicologist and harpsichordist at Queens College and
the director of the Aston Magna Academy. "But certain
chords would still be more racy or ripe than others."

Mean-tone becomes problematic in larger ensembles.
"For orchestral music, you have to be careful," said
Stephen Hammer, a Baroque oboist and the artistic director
of the New York Collegium. "I don't think equal temperament
is so bad. It needs to sound in tune above everything else.
Thinking in a temperament limits how in-tune you can play."

The oboe does not have fixed pitches, like a harpsichord's
strings, so it is not restricted to a particular temperament.
The violin and other fretless string instruments are also
free of such limitations except in the way their open strings
are tuned. "Temperament is very important," Mr. Manze said.
"For the violin there's no pattern to follow unless there's one in your
own mind."

With fretted string instruments, like the guitar, lute
and theorbo, and the various viols, the design of the
instrument changes the rules. Because each fret goes all
the way across the fingerboard, it creates equal
intervals on each string. So equal temperament was advocated
for tuning lute strings as early as the 16th
century. Yet lutenists have learned tricks to "temper"
their instruments in ensembles, like tying pieces of gut
just above the fret, or attaching bits of toothpick to the fingerboard.

Keyboard instruments have their own special issues. On a
modern piano, for example, there is one black key between the
white keys D and E. That black key is called both D sharp
and E flat. On a harpsichord in mean tone, D sharp and E flat a
re separate pitches, a fifth of a tone apart. A key tuned a
s E flat cannot be used for D sharp.

During the mid-15th century in Italy, composers and players
experimented with chromatic notes. It occurred to someone
to make two small keys between D and E, so that the
keyboardist could play either D sharp or E flat. And so
the split-key organ and harpsichord were born.

The organ came first and was specifically designed to
accompany singers in church. Split keys offered the
great advantage of making every major and minor chord
sound pure, avoiding the unhappy compromise of
equal temperament.

C HRISTOPHER STEMBRIDGE, a keyboardist and musicologist
at the School of Church Music in Brescia,
Italy, and an expert in Italian music of the late
Renaissance and early Baroque, owns an instrument
called a "cimbalo cromatico," or chromatic harpsichord.
It has 19 notes per octave, allowing for every distinct
natural, sharp and flat note. Such instruments existed
during the 17th century, in Italy and elsewhere.

The most extreme split-key instruments, called
"archicembalos," had 28, 31, even 36 keys per octave:
obviously, more than two keys for each piano black key.
"It becomes very illogical to play," said Mr. Stembridge,
who has tried to play a 1606 instrument with 31 notes
per octave. "I cannot imagine that anyone played fluently on this."

Mr. Stembridge finds that his 19-note cimbalo cromatico
poses no real problems for the player accustomed to ordinary
mean-tone harpsichords. For each split key, the sharp or flat
usually found in mean tone is at the front. The player
reaches to the back of the key to find the less-used chromatic note.

Like split-key organs, the cimbalo cromatico was
originally intended to accompany singers. But some
composers and theorists of the late 16th and early
17th centuries wrote pieces specifically to show off its
unusual capabilities. These composers, like Ascanio
Mayone and Giovanni Maria Trabaci, are not exactly
household names.

When Mr. Stembridge plays in the United States, he
uses a cimbalo cromatico built for him by Willard
Martin, a harpsichord maker in Bethlehem, Pa. Mr.
Martin has a special interest in the chromatic harpsichord,
which reaches beyond the obvious issues of temperament.

The 16th century produced a flowering of neo-Platonic
mysticism among the European aristocracy. One
manifestation was an attempt to equate musical notes
with visual colors.

Mr. Martin is interested in the 16th-century painter
Giuseppe Arcimboldo. In a treatise from 1590, Mr.
Martin explained, "Arcimboldo presented a formula
with which he had converted paintings into pieces of
music." In that treatise he uses the word "gravicembalo"
to describe the instrument in the court of Prague
on which he made such a conversion. But Mr. Martin
believes that it was some kind of cimbalo cromatico.
According to court inventories, there was one in Prague
at the time.

Unfortunately, Arcimboldo did not disclose which paintings
he converted. As he was writing the treatise, he
would have been painting the famous portrait of Rudolf II
of Prague in fruits and vegetables.

"The neo-Platonic idea that tone and color can be unified
was like an alchemic article of faith," Mr. Martin
said. "It's like trying to turn lead into gold. They
believed it could be done but did not know how."

Another, later, music-loving painter, Domenichino, made
reference to the relationship of music to color in
surviving letters. Mr. Martin is exploring the possibilities
of this musical alchemy in collaboration with
Thomas D. Kaufmann of the art department at Princeton University.

There is no question that the high-culture fashions
of the late 16th and early 17th centuries were influenced
by classical antiquity. Many experiments with music
were aimed at recreating the sort of intense emotional
response Aristotle described in his writings about poetry and rhetoric.

The cimbalo cromatico fits into this experimental movement.
Its microtonal capabilities certainly intensify the
rhetorical impact of the music. Mr. Stembridge recently
demonstrated Mr. Martin's instrument to a gathering
of music scholars, composers and performers in New York.
Hearing so many pure intervals was disorienting.
It brought out obvious physical and psychological reactions in
listeners.

During a brief setting of the Kyrie by Ascanio
Mayone, audience members were so alarmed at the bizarre
sound that they began to giggle nervously. "You're
not supposed to be laughing," Mr. Stembridge said from
the harpsichord. "You're supposed to be praying."

Mean-tone temperament is essential to unlock the emotional
charge embedded in much early Baroque music. "All the
music written for the piano has missed out on the
opportunity for this sort of expression,"
Mr. Manze said. "Imagine what Liszt would have done with mean-tone."

Even without questions of temperament, Baroque tuning
would be a matter of controversy. Another
essential issue keeps the pegs cranking up and down:
pitch frequency.

Since the 1930's, pitch has been more or less
universally standardized for Western art music. Today the A
above middle C sounds at 440 vibrations per second.
But during the Baroque, a baffling array of pitch
standards were used for different instruments. From
city to city, that A might sound at all sorts of
pitches, from what the modern ear hears as an F
above middle C, up to the modern high C.

Opinions about pitch vary widely among musicians
determined to be historically accurate. Gwendolyn
Toth, a harpsichordist and the director of the New
York-based ensemble Artek, does her utmost to use the
historically accurate pitch for any given piece.
"If you know something was at a high pitch and you
change it to low pitch," she explained, "to me
it's the same thing as saying, 'Well, the composer
wrote these 16th notes, but let's change them to these other notes.' "

Mr. Martin agrees that pitch is a part of the music.
He recently made a harpsichord at a remarkably low
pitch, reflecting the overwhelming evidence for such
a standard in Paris at the time of Louis Couperin.

"If you play Couperin at A = 345, which is a major
third below 440, you can play slower and articulate
differently," he said. "The instrument teaches the
musician a lot about the music." A S a performer, Mr.
Stembridge sees the issue in another light. "I don't
think there's anything sacrosanct about pitch," he
said. "I see nothing wrong in playing music at
whatever pitch makes musical sense and makes an instrument sing."

At the opposite extreme from Couperin is Claudio
Monteverdi, whose music is thought to have been
originally played at a very high pitch. "A lot of
violinists are not happy about that," Mr. Stembridge said. "I
don't see any merit in trying to be authentic in a
case where the musicians are uncomfortable."

Enter the fearless Mr. Manze, known for his use of
scordatura, a technique in which the violin strings
are purposefully tuned at the "wrong" pitch to achieve
particular effects. "I think a lot of violinists are
awfully precious about pitch, worrying that it will
harm their instruments," Mr. Manze said. "But I
rather enjoy the danger of it."

Yet on the subject of historical pitch frequencies,
Mr. Manze is less enthralled. "It has always left
me rather cold," he said. "The violin was designed
to be played at all sorts of pitches. You just have
to slot your brain into the right pitch, then you're fine."

The pursuit of historical accuracy can be impeded by
economics. Ms. Toth and her husband, Dongsok Shin,
also a harpsichordist, together own nine instruments.
"When I first started playing, I thought I'd buy one
French harpsichord," Mr. Shin said. "But the more
seriously you get into it, the more you realize that the
regional differences between instruments are important."

The physical environment can also wreak havoc on the
best intentions. At a recent Artek concert at the
Church of the Resurrection in Manhattan, the onstage
tuning took so much time that the musicians
nervously joked with the audience. "We couldn't tune in
the sacristy, because it was too cold, so everyone
had to go out and tune with me," Ms. Toth said. "The
practicality is almost insurmountable."

Mr. Shin has run into other practical troubles lately.
"I just did a concert at low French pitch," he said. "But
the three string players all had to go to the shop and
have their sound posts adjusted for this concert. One
of the violinists was playing other things. He had to
borrow a violin so he wouldn't have to tune his
instrument up and down."

Not suprisingly, some musicians balk at such inconveniences.
Part of their resistance may be caused by a lack of
familiarity with Baroque practice. Playing on period
instruments in period styles is not an everyday
part of modern musical training.

Mr. Erickson, the harpsichordist and musicologist,
teaches Baroque performance practice to doctoral
students at the City University of New York, but
even in that setting, practicalities limit him.

"Tuning is not one of my primary concerns in teaching,
because the students here all play modern instruments,"
he said. "They are used to playing in equal temperament.
You can't just pick up every couple of weeks and decide
you're going to play in mean tone. So I concentrate on
those things, like bowing and fingering, that I think
they can put immediately into their playing."

All this fuss over pitch and temperaments may strike
some as a tempest in a very arcane sort of teacup. Yet
Baroque musicians and serious listeners find these issues
of central importance. As Mr. Stembridge said, when asked
why he commits such energy to his study of split-key
instruments: "No one would ever ask why the Metropolitan
Museum of Art was restoring a great painting to its
original colors. What I'm doing is the same thing."

* * * * * * * *

What isn't in the net version of this article:

"ANNE E. JOHNSON, a doctoral student in
musicology at the City University of
Ne work, teaches at Hunter College."

and a photo:

"A harpsichord with split keys, from 1696,
has multiple notes between white keys,
for example, D sharp and E flat,
which are identical on a typical
keyboard, can be distinguished in unequal temperaments."

I scanned most of the picture (that would fit on my scanner)
and put it here:

http://www.virtulink.com/immp/bin/nytimes.jpg
240k

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