... It simply establishes the two borders of a pitch range which may be divided in numerous ways, providing us with quite other scales and musical systems. ... The slendro: ‘is obtained by dividing an octave into five equal parts.’ Such tones cannot be reproduced on western musical instruments which have fixed diatonic tuning such as the piano. ... Central to his musical system was the role of the ‘fifth’ or ‘perfect fifth’, and it is the connection between 5ths and octaves that lies at the heart of the problems of tuning found in Western music. ... ’ This is the fundamental flaw in an almost perfect system of music and one which has meant centuries of debate about how to order music, scales, notes and tuning. ... Various systems of tuning have been adopted and these have been linked with certain characteristics of musical composition and production. As musicians wanted to develop, so new tuning methods were used, the most revolutionary being the adoption of equal temperament, credited in particular to the work of Bach, which achieved western, and latterly global, dominance from about 1820-50. ...
Before equal temperament was adopted western music tried at least three other methods of tuning. All could work in certain circumstances but had their own disadvantages and they were displaced by equal temperament.
‘Just intonation’ was: ‘tuning in which the distances between pitches are based on the natural harmonic series. ... ’
The Pythagorean tuning system used perfect 5ths as its basis.
‘Mean-tone temperament’ was used on keyboards between about 1550 – 1750 and included: ‘some perfectly tuned intervals but permitted playing in only a restricted range of keys.’
These systems all exhibited slight differences, for example the 5th of mean tone temperament: ‘contains 697 cents, as opposed to the fifth of 702 cents in Pythagorian tuning and the 700 cents of equal temperament. ... He suggests an early solution to the tuning problem was to keep music simple and within one octave, playing just one note at a time. ... However Goodall argues the dissonance of these notes was as a result of ‘pure tuning’. If you modified the tuning slightly these notes began to create exciting new harmonies and you could do this easily using voices rather than instruments, which could easily tune into these. ...
The central problem of the earlier forms of tuning is that you were restricted to music in just one key.
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