Goddamn Equal Temperament. XXXII

 Equal Temperament Killed Tonality and I'm Living in the Wreckage (thank fucking god)

by Peter Thoegersen

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: equal temperament didn't save tonality. It killed it. Slowly, over about three hundred years, with a lot of gorgeous music produced along the way — but killed it nonetheless. And I'm the guy living in the rubble, doing something completely different with the wreckage. Let me explain.

Meantone: The First Compromise

Before equal temperament there was meantone — the tuning system that made thirds pure at the expense of certain fifths. The wolf interval. If you've ever heard a harpsichord play in a remote key and felt your spine contract, that's the wolf. Certain chromatic notes were simply unusable. The harmonic vocabulary was physically constrained by the tuning. You couldn't fuck around in Db major because the instrument wouldn't let you.

This wasn't a moral position. It was acoustics. The overtone series — the natural harmonic hierarchy generated by any vibrating string or column of air — was so thoroughly embedded in the tuning systems of the time that straying too far from the fundamental meant the instrument literally snarled at you.

Well Temperament: Bach Opens the Door

Then came well temperament. All keys usable — not equal, but functional. Each key retaining its own slightly different color and character. This is what made the Well-Tempered Clavier possible. Bach wasn't writing in equal temperament. He was writing in a world where every key worked, but no two keys sounded identical. The remote chromatic keys had a different quality — a little sharper, a little more tense, a little more exciting, precisely because they were further from home.

This matters because well temperament was the first serious crack in the overtone series hegemony. Suddenly, you could go to Db major and come back. The wolf was tamed. Chromatic notes that had been acoustically forbidden became available — not fully equal to the diatonic notes, but usable. The treasury was beginning to open.

Equal Temperament: The Revolution Nobody Understood

Equal temperament flattened everything. All keys identical. All chromatic notes fully available. All enharmonic equivalences are real rather than theoretical — Db and C# the same fucking pitch, period, end of discussion. The piano as we know it became possible. And with it, an explosion of chromatic harmony that nobody at the time fully understood the implications of.

Here's what equal temperament actually did: it made chromatic pre-dominant chords available as a complete treasury. The Neapolitan — that gorgeous flat-two major chord that has no clean derivation from the overtone series and works entirely through voice leading. The augmented sixths — Italian, French, German — all of them chromatic voice leading objects with only the most tenuous acoustic justification. The common-tone diminished seventh. The chromatic mediant. Every one of these chords is a product of equal temperament making chromatic voice leading fully available.

And they all cluster in the pre-dominant area. Why? Because that's where you can most productively defer the arrival of the dominant. The longer you extend the pre-dominant, the more weight the eventual resolution carries. These chromatic chords are delay mechanisms — exquisite, harmonically complex ways of saying not yet. They extended the expressive range of tonal music enormously. And in doing so, they quietly, systematically undermined the acoustic foundations of the tonal system they were supposedly serving.

The Neapolitan: Exhibit A

Take the Neapolitan in C major. The Ab descends by half step to G. The F holds as a common tone into the dominant seventh. The Db leaps to B — a diminished third, enharmonically a major second, but felt as a leap because of the notational distance. The voice leading is doing all the work. The chord exists because of those three specific motions, not because of any acoustic derivation.

Someone will tell you the Neapolitan can be justified by the overtone series — the 17th harmonic on C is approximately a minor second above the fundamental, close to Db. Sure. Fine. But you have to climb to the 17th partial to get there. The partials that do the real structural work in common practice harmony are the 2nd through the 6th. By the time you reach the 17th the acoustic energy is so attenuated it's essentially theoretical. You're not hearing the 17th partial as a generating force. Nobody is. The argument that the Neapolitan is acoustically justified is technically defensible and practically meaningless.

What you're actually hearing is voice leading. Half-step motion. Common tone retention. Chromatic leap to the leading tone. That's it. That's all it is. And it's fucking beautiful precisely because it doesn't need the overtone series to justify it. It justifies itself through motion.

Wagner Finishes the Job

By the time you get to Tristan und Isolde in 1865, the overtone series is barely holding on. The Tristan chord — that opening sonority that refuses to resolve for four and a half hours — is the sound of tonal harmony eating itself. Chromatic voice leading had become so sophisticated, the pre-dominant area so extended, the deferred resolution so prolonged, that the resolution itself started to feel beside the point.

Equal temperament had done its work. By making all chromatic notes available, it had given composers the tools to systematically dissolve the acoustic foundations of the system those tools were supposed to serve. The chromatic revolution didn't strengthen tonality. It consumed it from the inside.

Schoenberg, Webern, and the Question That Remained

Schoenberg drew the logical conclusion: if the overtone series no longer organizes pitch, what does? His answer was the row — a pre-compositional ordering of all twelve chromatic pitches that treats them as genuinely equal, with no acoustic hierarchy among them. It was the right diagnosis and a problematic solution. The row is a pitch ordering discipline, not a voice leading system. It answers the question of what replaces tonal hierarchy with a bureaucratic procedure rather than a compositional principle.

Webern understood the problem more deeply. His pitch cells — trichords like 014, built from a semitone and a minor third — are specifically chosen to avoid the intervals that imply tonal hierarchy. No perfect fifth. No major third. The cells are anti-hierarchical objects, chosen because they don't point home. His music feels weightless, suspended, freed from the gravitational field of the fundamental. But he was still working in 12-TET, where the perfect fifth is always structurally present even when compositionally avoided. He was swimming upstream. The current was still there.

Where This Leaves Me

Equal temperament was adopted to serve tonal harmony. It made chromatic voice leading possible. Chromatic voice leading progressively weakened the overtone series derivation of chords. The weakening of overtone series derivation led to atonality. Atonality raised the question of what organizes pitch if not the overtone series. The answers — serial ordering, set theory, pitch cell invariance — were partial solutions to a problem that required a different tuning system to fully solve.

I'm at the end of that goddamn chain. My equal-tempered microtonal scales complete the trajectory that meantone temperament began. I'm not randomly choosing weird tunings because I think it's interesting (even though I am). I'm choosing temperaments — and when necessary imposing compositional discipline (intention) within temperaments that contain a fifth — specifically because the overtone series hierarchy is the thing I'm getting the fuck away from. The voice leading between independent simultaneous systems is what I'm doing.

The road from meantone to my music is a single unbroken logical trajectory. It took three hundred years and a lot of dead ends. But the direction was always the same: away from acoustic derivation, toward voice leading as the primary organizing principle of pitch. I didn't start that journey. I'm just the one who followed it to where it was actually going.

You're welcome, Western music history. Sorry it took so long.