What we now call simply ‘the piano’ was invented in around 1700 by a Florentine instrument builder and restorer called Bartolomeo Cristofori. The unique selling point of the new instrument, distinguishing it from all the harpsichords, clavichords, spinets and virginals that went before it, was its ability to play ‘soft and loud’ – or, in Italian, ‘piano e il forte’.
Its main predecessor, the harpsichord, plucked its strings, like a harp on its side in a box, and the mechanism only allowed for a single pluck of uniform strength, thereby creating a sound that was always one volume. No matter how hard you pressed the keys, the sound had the same power. The only way of making a harpsichord louder was to have a double (or triple) set of strings that were plucked simultaneously, a mechanism that was, once again, either all on or all off. The only way of making it softer was to lay felt against the strings – also either on or off – and there was no way of moving gradually from one state to the other.
Cristofori’s invention, instead of plucking the strings, tapped them with a gentle hammer tipped with deerskin. Crucially, the harder you hit the key the harder the hammer hit the string, resulting potentially in different levels of volume for every note. The piano was a musical revolution, but despite its ingenuity and novelty it did not catch on in Italy, whose intense relationship with stringed instruments – among them the harpsichord – was second only to its passion for opera. (The piano, which, like the harpsichord, operated via an arrangement of tightened strings, was from the outset treated as a new species, an outsider to the string family of instruments.) It took a German organ builder and friend of J. S. Bach, Gottfried Silbermann, to see the piano’s potential and – with help and advice from Bach – to begin manufacturing pianos. Indeed, it was thought for many decades outside Italy that Silbermann had actually invented the piano, such was the oblivion into which Cristofori’s effort had fallen.
It was around the same time that the piano’s close relative the organ also mastered the art of volume control, thanks to a device called a ‘ratchet swell pedal’. This mechanism opened or closed shutters on a box containing the pipes, thus allowing organ sounds to get progressively louder or softer. In 1711 an organ was installed at the church of St Magnus-the-Martyr at London Bridge with such a pedal, thought to be the first of its kind.
Although Bach played on a few of Silbermann’s prototype pianos, he never expressed any great enthusiasm for them. It was his son, Johann Christian, living in London, who was to be the champion of the new instrument thirty or so years later, paving the way for the young Mozart and others to follow his lead. But Bach père was involved in a keyboard innovation that proved equally important to the history of music as the invention of the piano. It could in fact be the single most important invention in all Western music. Like nuclear fusion, it’s not easy to explain but it had an enormous effect. It was called Equal Temperament.
It all started with a problem. The problem was that composers were outgrowing not just the old modes and the restrictions placed on them but also the complicated system of tuning that allowed instruments to play in different keys. It was bad enough that many instruments found it difficult to play with each other and stay ‘in tune’, which was partly because they were not designed to be able to play in lots of different modes, or keys, and partly because the materials they were made of – animal gut, treated soft woods, lightweight metals – made them, by modern standards, unstable in variable temperatures. (In the 1970s, when the movement to reproduce ‘authentic’ replicas of pre-1800 instruments was enjoying its early boom, orchestras discovered that it was virtually impossible for these replicas, or indeed the few originals pressed back into service, to stay in tune with each other for more than a few minutes. Recordings of, say, Bach on these instruments involved hundreds if not thousands of edits, splicing together countless snippets from numerous ‘takes’ to fake the sound of a tuneful ensemble.) This issue of tuning came to a head with the growing dominance of keyboard instruments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
On a modern ‘equal-tempered’ keyboard, I can play in any or all of the available twelve key-families – that is, major and minor versions of all the notes that lie between our Western octave – to my heart’s content, and I can switch from one to another whenever I like. I can play any piece in any key without worrying that the piano, or organ, will sound out of tune when I move from key to key. I can also play any other instrument I like, for as long as I want, within reason, without succumbing to the same worry. But this was not the case until the growing dominance of keyboard instruments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries finally led to a breakthrough in the first few years of the eighteenth: the adoption of Equal Temperament in Western music.
In order to understand the importance and impact of this breakthrough – and indeed to understand what Equal Temperament is – we need to look back at what it swept away, which was, in effect, nature’s tuning system. Why would eighteenth-century musicians have wanted to do away with nature’s musical laws?
To illustrate nature’s musical laws we can use a piece of pipe or tubing. If you blow across the mouth of a length of tubing you can make a musical note. This is the technology behind every flute, whistle, shakuhachi or recorder ever blown in the history of humankind. Obviously each length of tube only plays one main note, so if you want to play more than a one-note tune you’ll need to change the length of the column of air; a Swanee whistle demonstrates perfectly that, if you gradually shorten the length of air in the tube, the pitch of your note becomes higher and higher.
As we saw when we first encountered the octave, if your column of air is exactly half the length of where you started, you will get a note that is the same pitch, only higher. If you glide up the octave from bottom to top on a Swanee whistle, however, all sorts of notes are revealed between the two, and every musical system in the world has subdivided the octave into formal, measurable positions along that scale. But not every musical system in the world opted for the same number of subdivisions. Much Asian and Arabian music has a larger number, as a result of which it often sounds exotic and ‘out of tune’ to Western ears. The Western system had by about 1600 settled on just nineteen subdivisions between one note and its octave, and all of these nineteen pitches were determined by natural, mathematical ratios in the relationship between one string or pipe length and another. These tunings have been called ‘Pythagorean’ because it was the Ancient Greek philosopher-mathematician-physicist Pythagoras who worked out the ratios for creating notes in music (by dividing a taut cord and plucking it). These nineteen subdivisions were easily singable, or playable on stringed instruments, because tiny differences of pitch can be achieved by allowing your voice to rise by minute degrees, or by sliding your finger ever so slightly up or down the neck of the violin. But for keyboard instruments, on which the pitches of each step are firmly fixed, these nineteen subdivisions were a nightmare. Two solutions were on offer.
One was to build keyboards with the necessary fidgety subdivisions.
This is a picture of a nineteen-note-per-octave keyboard; notice the double-decker nature of the black notes and the extra little black note between the bigger clusters. It is absurdly difficult to play, but not quite as deranged as the thirty-one-note keyboard built by a Venetian called Vito Trasuntino in 1606, involving triple-decker black and white notes. He called it the ‘Clavemusicum Omnitonum’ (all-tones musical keyboard). It did not catch on. More notes does not mean better music.
The other solution was to reduce the number of divisions from nineteen to a more manageable twelve and to fudge the swallowing up of the pitches that were left out. This meant, for example, the two separate notes G♭ and F# were combined into one, all-purpose note: one key represented them both.
But this was not quite the brilliant solution it might have seemed, since F# and G♭ were still – to stringed instruments, singers and some brass players – separate notes, albeit just a short distance apart. If a keyboard played its G♭ while the
violin played an F# it produced an unpleasant, headache-inducing dissonance. This grating struggle over where the pitch should fall affected most of the notes of the scale in one way or another. It was a bad state of affairs. All that keyboard tuners could do was plump for one or the other, and squeeze the strings this way or that, so that, for example, key-families using the sharps (edging upwards in pitch) – E major, A major, B major – would be favoured while key-families requiring the flats (edging downwards in pitch) would have to be avoided. Which explains why moving between key-families that had flats to ones with sharps was dangerous and disagreeable. And keyboard tuners were kept incredibly busy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: keyboards of all kinds had to be tuned every day, or at least before every performance, rather as harps or guitars must still be tuned for every performance today.
Clearly this was not satisfactory either for keyboard tuners or composers, who were in practical terms restricted to certain keys. I doubt it was much fun for all the other instrumentalists, either, who would not ordinarily have been bound by such restrictions. But why did it matter that G♭ and F# carried on being separate notes everywhere other than on a keyboard, or B# and C, or B♭ and A#? Why couldn’t the violinists and singers forget they ever existed and toe the line?
The reason is that the more precise divisions of the octave into nineteen steps obeys mathematical ratios that occur in nature. Let’s say your column of air, your bamboo pipe, is of such a length and thickness that, when you blow across its mouth, the note produced is a pure, lovely-sounding B. Dividing the column of air by the mathematically perfect ratio of 2:1 will produce Little B, an octave higher. Dividing that column of air by the mathematically perfect ratio of 3:2 will produce F#. These relationships, and all the others based on mathematically straightforward ratios, are pure and ‘perfect’.
However, if even just this 3:2 ratio is applied to all the notes in the scale – A, B, C, D, E, F, G – and thereafter to all the ‘perfect’ 3:2 ratio notes they throw up – E, F#, G, A, B, C, D – and thence the ‘perfect’ 3:2 ratio notes they throw up – B, C#, D, E, F#, G#, A – and so on, you eventually end up with too many sharps and too many flats to accommodate, and this is before we worry about all the other perfect ratios. The upshot of all this is that it was generally considered a worthwhile compromise, for the sake of keyboard practicality, to reduce the number of divisions from nineteen to twelve, even though this omitted some of nature’s purely produced notes.
The next act in this drama had tuners artificially moving the pitch of some of the twelve subdivisions so that, instead of lying where they should according to nature’s laws, they were shunted into twelve equally spaced, man-made positions between the two ends of the octave. It would be like re-portioning the days, hours and minutes so that there were exactly twelve months of thirty days in every calendar year. It was this recalibration of pitch that became Equal Temperament – or equal tuning.
Although others had hinted at the possibility of evenly dividing the twelve notes of the octave, the first precise calculations of an equal temperament were made by Vincenzo Galilei in his Dialogo delta musica antica et della moderna of 1581, and by Zhu Zaiyu, a Ming dynasty prince, in Lüxue xinshuo (New Explanation of Musical Pitches) in 1584. Why these two dates are curiously close, given the geographical distance between Europe and China, is a mystery yet to be unravelled, but Galilei’s and Zhu Zaiyu’s calculations were the same – one worked out using lengths of plucked cord (Galilei) and the other with thirty-six specially made bamboo pipes (Zhu Zaiyu). The calculations showed that each string or bamboo pipe had to be 94.38744% of the length of the previous one in ascending order; the twelfth rung would thus be exactly 50% the length of the first.
Having the theory, though, did not lead to its immediate adoption as a tuning system in either China or Europe. In the West it took another century of experiment and debate before this evenly spaced solution for twelve, not nineteen, notes emerged as the front-runner solution. Gradually, over the course of the seventeenth century, all instruments were reluctantly persuaded to conform to the twelve-note division of the keyboard, needing to be tuned before every performance to the pitches that best suited the keyboard. Though it was created in defiance of nature’s musical laws, the new, interlocking, standardised system came with huge benefits, not least making all twelve key-families compatible. Out of the chaos and confusion, the evenly spaced octave was born and we have lived with that huge shift in Western music ever since.
It was J. S. Bach who presented, in around 1722, the most conclusive evidence that an Equal Temperament system could work. He called his system ‘The Well-Tempered Keyboard’, landmarked for ever in history by his composing two companion pieces, a prelude and a fugue, for every one of the newly adapted key-families. Its first prelude is now very well known – and incidentally made up entirely of a chord sequence, no melody, exactly as Bach’s hero Vivaldi might have done.
Equal temperament, or the ‘well-tempered’ keyboard, wasn’t perfect, but it was a practical solution to what had hitherto seemed intractable problems. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of its arrival and adoption as a standard across the industrialised world. Like the adoption of the Greenwich Meridian, which made everyone perceive the map and their place on it in a new way, for better or worse, Equal Temperament altered the mindset of everyone who enjoyed music. The modern population of the world now hears all music through the filter – some would say imperfection – of Equal Temperament. Indeed, all of us alive today have a different impression of what sounds ‘in tune’ or ‘off key’ from those alive in, say, 1600.
The sense of order out of chaos that was ushered in by ‘well-tempered’ keyboards would have appealed to Bach enormously. There is a fundamental logic at work in all he wrote that was not merely the function of a character trait – like people who simply have to order their bookshelves alphabetically – but rather a product of his deeply felt Lutheran faith. All you have to do is compare the atmosphere and architecture of an Italian church of the period, or even the Catholic south of Germany, with the kind of church Bach was familiar with in Saxony to see how profoundly this difference of attitude might have affected every note he composed.
Bach’s Lutheran Christianity, unlike the Papal Catholicism with which Galileo Galilei battled, was at ease with scientific investigation and the widening education of its laity – indeed, it positively encouraged it. Though he might not have recognised the label, Bach’s faith falls within the movement known as German Pietism, which reached its high-water mark in his lifetime. Pietism laid great store by helping congregations find God themselves, through personal acquaintance and knowledge of the scriptures, through humility, non-confrontation and piety, through an ethos of hard work, and through education. Subsequent scholarship – notably Robert K. Merton’s seminal 1936 thesis and 1938 book, Science, Technology and Society in 17th-Century England – has helped establish the dynamic link between the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the one hand and Anglican Puritanism and Lutheran Pietism on the other. For our purposes it is enough to note that Bach, an inventive musician par excellence, was actively involved in the search for Equal Temperament, the development of the piano in Germany and the design of state-of-the-art techniques in organ building – and yet saw no contradiction between the scientific and the religious aspects of his music-making. On the contrary, his Pietism embraced the relationship between God and science.
For Lutheran Pietists like Bach, illuminating the Gospel was paramount, as were metaphors of light and transparency. Lutheran (and Reformed) churches were purged of decorative trappings, elaborate altarpieces, art that was potentially distracting, statues of saints and the kind of ornate, gold-leaf trinketry that sprawled across the walls of Catholic churches of the period, a style that is sometimes referred to as ‘high Baroque’ or ‘Rococo’. Lutheran congregations were expected to be active participants in the service, with communal hymn-singing given high status. A h
uge amount of what Bach wrote – including virtually all his three-hundred-plus cantatas and his vast output of organ music – is based one way or another on hymn tunes, or ‘chorales’, as he would have called them. He would weave a tapestry of sound around a hymn being sung or played slowly through the centre of the work, as he does to majestic effect in ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, in which what appears to be a lilting dance theme is transformed by the stately progression across it of a German hymn-chorale.
To Bach, the point of music was to glorify God, to reflect upon, interpret and celebrate the meaning and mystery of the scriptures. Because the Protestant reformation had grown out of a sense of disillusionment with the corruption of the Roman Church, central to Lutheran attitudes was the importance and sanctity of law, uprightness and thrift, and Bach’s way of expressing this priority in music was through a technique we have already touched upon but of which he was the undisputed master of all time: counterpoint.
Counterpoint, to Bach, was the ultimate set of laws in music; obeying these laws was for him something beautiful, uplifting and reassuring. The quintessential Bachian form of counterpoint was the fugue. A fugue, which means ‘flight’ in Italian, is a complicated form of canon, or round, such as ‘London’s Burning’, in which, as in any canon or round, the same tune is sung by different groups at different points, each new entry fitting on top of the others. A fugue is an extremely clever and essentially more grown-up version of the same thing. In a typical Bach fugue, such as the ‘Gigue Fugue’, the tune to be imitated would be much longer than the four notes that begin ‘London’s Burning’. In the ‘Gigue Fugue’, the first part (or Voice’, though it is all played by one organist, with the help of his or her extremely athletic feet) is then joined by three others, also carrying this tune. Some of the entries in the ‘Gigue Fugue’ are in new keys – it starts in G major, but there are versions in D major, B minor, briefly A major and also E minor – and some are upside-down: that is, the tune leaps upwards in one version and downwards in the variant. Another fugal trick is ‘retrograde’ motion, whereby the tune is played backwards against its forward-playing self. In some fugues Bach introduces the incoming imitation at half or double the speed of the original, and sometimes he uses a number of these techniques at the same time in the same fugue, in different ‘voices’. He truly was a master of the counterpoint form.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 11