The point of the WTC was not, “Hey, you can play music in all the keys now because they are all interchangeable.” The point was, “Hey, you can play in all the keys now, and they all sound a little different, so here’s some music that takes advantage of those differences for a range of emotional effects.” Instead, Bach tuned so as to give each key a distinct harmonic personality, with some a bit sunnier and smoother, and others darker and edgier. He wanted to have every key be usable, but he did not want them all to sound the same. The important idea here is that Bach split the difference between meantone and 12-TET. Go read Lehman’s papers for an explanation of how this would work. He interprets it to be a diagram showing the harpsichord tuning peg turns you make to change meantone temperament into Bach’s tuning. See the squiggly line across the top? Lehman thinks that it’s not a decorative doodle. Take a look at the cover of Bach’s main handwritten copy of the WTC: Bradley Lehman has a theory with a Da Vinci Code quality that sounds unhinged at first, but I find it to be convincing. Unfortunately, no one knows exactly what system (or systems) this might have been. However, in the past few decades, evidence has emerged showing that Bach used a different tuning system. None of the keys sound perfect, but all of them are at least tolerable.įor many years, musicologists assumed that Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) as a showcase for 12-TET. Rather than keeping some keys pure while making others unusable, 12-TET distributes the out-of-tuneness evenly across all of the keys. Given the limits of meantone, you can see why the Western world collectively abandoned it in favor of our current standard tuning system, twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET). Gann explains why in The Arithmetic of Listening, his relatively accessible book about tuning. However, A major and E major are queasy, and B major and F-sharp major sound horrible. The recording starts with C major, which sounds beautiful. Kyle Gann helpfully illustrates this with a recording of all twelve meantone major chords. This system sounds great in C major and nearby keys, but the further away you move on the circle of fifths, the worse everything sounds. The main tuning system in Bach’s time was called meantone temperament. Western Europeans wanted to be able to change keys, however, and that required some tuning compromises. In Hindustani classical tradition, they opted for being in tune, so everything is in a single “key” defined by the omnipresent drone. The practical consequence is that your music can either be in perfect tune, or it can use more than one key, but it can not do both.
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