The Sunday Listen: ‘Blueshift’ and ‘Deranged Landscape’ by Max De Wardener
For most of us, we’re used to pianos all being tuned to a certain standard. No piano is quite the same - the exact voice will change from make to make, from room to room - but without a stable tonal foundation, a musical operating system we all can agree to, it would pretty much be impossible to be musician.
It might surprise you, then, that this standardization is relatively recent invention. Before the 20th century, there was no standard tuning for pianos, and individual musicians would tune their instruments slightly differently.
For reasons of practicality and convenience, this lead eventually to the adoption of equal temperament (the system used on all modern pianos), where the octave is chopped up into 12 exactly equal parts (from C to C, say), where every tone and semitone is exactly same distance from each another. This means we now how have 12 equal keys, and all of which sound the same, apart from varying in pitch.
But before equal temperament came along, there were a whole range of tuning systems to choose from, including well-tempered tuning, just intonation, pythagorean tuning and meantone temperament. With nearly all of these tunings, the sizes between every tone and semitone were not consistent, and so every key and every chord had its own distinctive character, some more clear and bright, others with a sparkly, ‘out of tune’ quality.
There are those who argue the acoustical purity of modern tuning is overstated, and whatever we’ve gained in practically and convenience, we’ve lost in our understanding of the piano as, at its core, a machine for producing noises. Potentially all sorts of gloriously smashed up, glitchy, fast-beating noises.
What if we worked with an entirely different tonal palette entirely? What might we then create?
On Music for Detuned Pianos, the British composer Max de Wardener used four different types of ‘detuned pianos’, each de-tuning inspired by a different American composer. The two examples I’ve shared here – Blueshift (sounding like a Bhuddabox that’s been run over by a Ford Transit) and Deranged Landscape (overdubbing the same detuned piano for an uncanny, out-of-body effect) – have been played on painstakingly re-imagined tuning systems (played beautifully by Kit Downes), showing off strange, otherworldly acoustic ambiences only possible through exploring the outer limits of expressive, defiantly unequal tuning.
Ultimately, the choice of tuning is a matter of personal preference, historical context, and performance practice. Different tuning standards can offer unique tonal qualities and affect the overall sound and character of music. So where we might think there’s only one ‘correct’ way to tune a piano, a reliable benchmark on which to measure a harmonic event as either ‘in or ‘out’ of tune, ultimately it’s down to a matter of choice. Every sound is its own unique experience.
As Pablo Casals puts it:
Do not be afraid to be out of tune with the piano. It is the piano that is out of tune.
If you fancy going deeper into the rabbit hole, you’ll discover that it’s not actually mathematically possible to perfectly tune a piano.
I also highly recommend the book How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony by Ross W Duffin, but it is very technical and not for the faint of heart.