[CAUT] Serkin 1/7 comma

[Fred Sturm]

FWIW, here is an excerpt from program notes, written by Peter Serkin  
(11/1/2006):

The piano heard on tonight’s program
has been tuned to an old mean-tone tem-
perament known as “one-seventh syntonic
comma,” devised by Jean-Baptiste Romieu in
the 18th century. Designed to accommodate
most keys, this temperament simultaneously
retains vivid key colors. Romieu’s solution is
one of many temperaments that evolved over
the course of several centuries. It is a tuning
somewhere between the earlier ones—such as
“one-quarter comma,” which achieves a great
harmoniousness and purity in keys that ap-
pear in the upper half of the circle of fifths (in
other words, those that have three or fewer
sharps or flats) but cannot be convincingly
used with keys in the lower half of the circle
(with four or more sharps or flats)—and 19th-
century quasi–equal temperament tunings,
which negotiate all keys while still radiating
variegated key coloration.
Since the late 1800s, the traditional
mean-tone approach has been generally
abandoned in favor of standard equal tem-
perament. The establishment of this or-
thodoxy—that is, dividing an octave into
12 equidistant half-steps—resulted in the
loss of varied key colors, colors that, in the
older temperaments, are highlighted and
meaningful because of the irregularities of
their unequal distribution of semitones. In
equal temperament, the sameness of the
tunings of intervals has a neutralizing re-
sult: it renders keys indistinguishable from
one another, thus offering a vocabulary of
two basic keys, one major and one minor,
regardless of their transpositions.
With historical tunings, on the other
hand, there are 24 keys, each with its own
color and character. One can clearly dis-
cern the individuation of each key. It is
something subtle and, at the same time,
profound. Key colors are restored, giving
poignancy and meaningfulness to the har-
monies and their relationships.
I was tempted to sneak the old tunings
in unannounced to see if listeners would
sense something that sounded different
from that to which they had become accus-
tomed. In any case, there is no need for a
listener to fixate on the aspect of tuning at
all; it is simply interesting to explore how
we might respond to these tunings sponta-
neously and how we might integrate that
with our overall experience of the music.

Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu