Anyone here believe that orchestras play in equal temperament (ET)? I sincerely hope not. It's high time music theorists and teachers cleaned up their act and put ET back in its place. And it's way past time for ET's monopoly in electronic and computer-based production of music to be ended. Today there's no technical reason why digital music technology shouldn't catch up with the actual facts of orchestral music and allow orchestral composers to hear true Pythagorean intonation while writing.
Aesthetically, ET is a one-trick pony: it renders the blues scale like no other intonation schema can, chiefly because it has notes extremely close to the 17th and 19th partials (the "blue" note and the minor third). But blues-oriented music, having made billions for the pop music industry over several decades, has done its dash.
Other than its noble and virtuous service to the blues, ET is a 'good-time gal' of loose morals who will go with anyone and pretend to be like them (e.g. Pythagoras or meantone or just intonation). Of course composers have benefitted from this latter characteristic of ET - it's a tremendously convenient "rapid-protyping" tool. Music theorists and teachers too have benefitted from ET's "loose morals", sitting at a piano and conjuring up endless examples to show how pretty much anything goes these days - Juilliard Professor Vincent Persichetti being a prime example. (And please don't get me started on Schoenberg!)
Among the advocates of highly chromatic and atonal music composition, Paul Hindemith did at least acknowledge that the dreaded comma is a very real and necessary - if somewhat awkward and embarrassing - phenomenon in orchestral music, and which tends to be hidden in the least conspicuous places. Persichetti, by contrast, doesn't seem to worry at all about putting the comma in full view, even between two consecutive notes in the top line of a harmonic progression! (e.g. Persichetti, Twentieth Century Harmony, Ex. 3-19, p76.) It seems Schoenberg, Persichetti, and others like them were gripped by some militant kind of parochial blindness (or rather, deafness) in the cosy, conceited and convenient world of their beloved pianos. In music, to cheat the ear is to impoverish the soul. What spiritual poverty have these men inflicted on humanity?
My chief reason for wanting to dethrone the de facto monarchy of ET in computer-based music production is that I believe far too many professional composers and songwriters today are missing out on the manifold nuances and hence the enormous world of potential inspiration involved if they were to hear Pythagorean intonation as they play and write their pieces for orchestra; their productions all too often tend to be trite, platitudinous, clichéd, unadventurous or generally uninspiring as a consequence of using ET. With ET, they might as well try to make love to a woman while both are wearing astronaut's spacesuits. Indeed in the 1970s the UK Musicians Union issued a formal complaint that playing too much modernist atonal music was responsible for premature hair loss and conjugal dissatisfaction in the bedroom, among orchestral musicians!
Amateurs too, myself included, whose ears are not deeply and securely steeped in orchestral intonation, can rediscover the nuanced depths, beauty and complexity of melody when hearing their own meanderings on the keyboard rendered in Pythagorean intonation in real time. Some convenience is sacrificed, but I say the price is well worth it.
Cheers,
Macker
