Temperament, or De vita cum imperfectis

Abstract:Over the centuries, much ink has been spilled describing attempts to deal, in some musically satisfactory fashion, with the unavoidable fact that twelve stacked pure perfect fifths do not yield the same result as seven stacked octaves. In today's modern instruments practice, though the infelicitous harmonies arising from equal temperament are often disguised by continuous vibrato, players and singers occasionally color their melodic lines by inflecting pitches subtly to make them more "expressive," frequently to the greater detriment of the harmony.Temperament is usually approached from the viewpoints of theorists and/or keyboard players. J. S. Bach was born at a time when varieties of mean-tone temperament were still prevalent. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, not only had numerous well-temperaments become common, but major writers such as Leopold Mozart could pronounce, without further elaboration, that all the major and minor scales had identical intervallic structures. In this article, I take as a point of departure a commonly articulated late sixteenth-century classification system for instruments—according to their intonational flexibility—and apply it to the varying attitudes players of those instruments might have held from Bach's time to the present, including the use of melodic shading that can make for more in-tune, rather than more compromised, chords.