The other day I was asked to tune a piano to “C-just” for a student’s senior show. In case you didn’t know, just intonation refers to a way of tuning pitches to coincide exactly with the overtones of one central pitch, and to render most of the chords in that key very warm sounding, beatless, “pure”. When once upon a time I began tuning pianos, I had to back off for a spell because I was so disheartened at the extent to which it was necessary to compromise, or temper, those “true” intervals. If you can conjure the sound of a pedal-steel to mind, its strings are tuned just to each other, and produce roughly that same langorous, lovely, sonorous blossom of related tones. The fifths are satisfyingly proud and straight-backed, just barely wider than we’re used to hearing on a piano. The thirds are much more of a shock – majors being significantly narrower, and minors being proportionally wider. I always held that it sounded simple and good, and so it does. (For more about this, https://www.santafepianos.com/what-we-do/).
Most people don’t tune their pianos to just-intonation due to the fact that, inescapably, relationships between other notes become sour (even in the same key – for example the fifth from “D” to “A” in a C tuning, the main structural component of a supertonic chord, sounds downright hideous on a justly-tuned piano). I had heard tell, in a very sing-song kind of way, that Pythagoras was so confounded by the fact that twelve perfectly in-tune keys just don’t work out that he took his own life. I haven’t really looked into it, but I daresay that sounds self-indulgent enough to “ring true”!
Anyway, after a certain acceptance of the flawed, compromised nature of things, I was able to get back in the saddle and start tuning, and over a couple of years had not been asked to tune anything but a standard, equal-tempered scale. So you might imagine that this C-just tuning request held a tingle of excitement for me.
In the heat of battle, however, it was interesting to see how much I’ve really come to rely on, yea even to relish, that splash of dissonance spread evenly over the keyboard. As an aural tuner, just intonation wasn’t just a matter of putting my device on a different setting. First of all, it was unavoidable that I would play those certain howling intervals without meaning to, and most difficult to experience them against the smoothness of the other chords. Also, in terms of tuning, I’ve come to depend on dissonance to gauge where to place my octaves up and down the keyboard – the moderate beating of intervals acts as a solid pitch-measuring tool that I lean on constantly. Having all those still, beatless intervals intermingled with wolfishly-fast ones was sort of like trying to move fast underwater in a dream.
So I conclude that, now that I consider it, equal temperament no longer feels like the expression of a flawed world. I’d even go so far as to say there’s a justice in it, a rightness, a beauty and dignity, in the tempering that allows these divergent individual perspectives to coexist.