Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with timbrel and dancing, praise him with the strings and pipe, praise him with the clash of cymbals, praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.



Psalm 150:3-6



I was listening to Sam Leith’s interview of Paul Kildea on the Spectator Books podcast while I was driving. Their discussion turned to some of the reasons that Chopin’s 24 Preludes probably sounded very different when played today compared to when he played them on his piano’s, while composing them, one of which was simply a small composition pianino. One reason for the difference in sound is that the production quality of keyboard instruments is much more standardized today, so that notes played the same way on several different pianos will sound roughly equal, especially when compared to three different pianofortes, in Chopin’s day.



The other reason is related but a bit more complex in nature. There is, I found while I was listening to the podcast, an aspect of music called temperament, further investigation showed me that this is basically a musical tuning term. Today, most of our music uses equal temperament, but it seems equal temperament is not an ancient thing.



I don’t know a lot about musical science, but my somewhat simplistic understanding of temperament begins with the knowledge that when you tune an instrument you are trying to get it play a particular note. You do this so that when you take a particular action you hear a preset, or expected, note… rather than a random one. Ideally you want your modern day instrument to play 12 notes in each octave because that is how much the science of sound physics, combined with the preference of the human ear, seems to identify as being present. To achieve this the maker and tuner of the instrument have to manipulate the distance between various splits of the scale, specifically the thirds and fifths. This may all sound very complicated, but what it essentially means is that, in order to have a reliable way of striking the note they want, the musician needs their instrument to manipulate the octave range somehow to improve their chances both of hitting the note and have it sounding in tune to the human ear. Simply put, they need to gain control over the vibration range in a reliable, and repeatable, way.



Prior to certain manufacturing technology it was very difficult and expensive to produce a wide range of notes accurately on an instrument with multiple octaves. In Chopin’s day this was usually worked around by something referred to as “meantone temperament.” In other words, the craftsman worked hard to make sure that there was at least one, or some, octaves of the pianoforte whose notes were particularly accurate, while notes outside of this were less accurate. This is especially true for smaller keyboard instruments like the small pianino that Chopin used to finish his 24 Preludes. The composer and player then used the reliable range of notes as the main areas of musical composition and play, avoiding moving outside of this unless necessary or for effect. This would have given a slightly “on edge” feel to notes played outside the scale and introduced an element of risk to their playing, because there was no guarantee the note would be hit cleanly and in tune. It would be somewhere near it, but not as fully in tune as our modern ears prefer. So music as played by Chopin himself, who played as he composed on his pianino, (and who I understand is likely to have been moving outside the reliable range of his little pianino a fair bit,) was likely to have sounded to us quite unstable, unnerving in its unpredictability and rather haunting.



Gradually though the arrival of the ability to produce equal temperament on European key...