The subject of tuning systems seems to attract some pretty strong opinions. I don’t want to start an argument about which tuning system is “best.” In fact, I would much rather ask, do we have to have one “best” system? For example, a piano is simply more useful when tuned in equal temperament, and that is certainly the sound I expect when I listen to a piano playing Mozart or Chopin. But to my ear, brass ensembles get a fuller, more resonant sound when they play using just intonation, and it makes sense for early-music ensembles to use the tuning system that the music was composed in.
There are good arguments to be made for a single “expected” tuning. Many instruments are designed to be played with a specific tuning, so playing them in a different tuning system would be difficult or even impossible. Audiences often arrive with very specific comfort zones, and may be put off by unfamiliar tunings. For many students, it is difficult enough to learn to play in tune when there is only one “correct” tuning; learning to discriminate a variety of tunings might be even more difficult. And students aren’t the only ones who might struggle. Musicians already have a long list of things that have to be “negotiated” when they play together (tempo, dynamics, phrasing, style, and so on); adding tuning options would make things even more complex. And realistically, as much as I enjoy listening to music with a variety of tunings, as a mature (old?) musician, I am not sure that my ear could now learn an unfamiliar tuning system.
Interestingly, though, some developments over the past few decades have both exposed many people to a great variety of tuning traditions and have also made it easier to experiment with tuning. For the first time in history, if you really want to listen to recordings from a variety of music traditions, it is easy to do so. It is also not difficult for professional musicians and ensembles to tour all over the world giving performances and/or teaching. And nearly anyone, professional or not, can make and distribute recordings electronically, again world-wide. If you want to buy an instrument that uses an unfamiliar tuning, you can probably do so. If you have trouble tuning it by ear, an electronic tuner can help you tune it with confidence. With some electronic instruments, you can simply program a variety of tunings. I assume that that is one of the reasons that there are so many interesting experiments going on out there with microtonal music and new tuning systems. That, along with the interest in creating fusions of various music traditions.
I also wonder whether one of the reasons that Western music students struggle with tuning is because they often don’t get enough exposure to the idea of tuning as an aspect of music. Variations in tuning are an integral part of some music traditions. (For example, tuning is one way that two Indian ragas may be different from each other.) Are music students in those traditions more practiced at recognizing small distinctions in pitch? Perhaps they actually have less trouble learning to play in tune than do students in the Western tradition.
The variety of tuning systems out there are part of a rich musical historical and geographical inheritance, one that many modern musicians enjoy exploring and many audiences can appreciate. Simplifying can make things easier, but if we simplify too much, we risk making the world a less interesting, less wonder-full place to live. I would love to hear your tuning stories, experiences, preferences, and opinions.
This is interesting – I wasn’t really aware that there were different kinds of tuning. I just thought an instrument was “in tune” or not. Could you maybe talk about the different kinds of tuning more in detail? Do relatively-uneducated audiences really notice the difference between non-standard tunings?
I go into a lot of the technical details in my Tuning Systems article at Connexions, but the basic idea is this: Given the physics and aesthetics of sound, it is not at all obvious how to divide an octave into scales, and even given a scale, it is not obvious what the exact pitch (the tuning) of each note should be. There are trade-offs involved in solving this problem, and different music traditions have come up with different solutions. Each solution both reflects the aesthetic preferences of the culture that produced it and also affects the music that is created in that culture, creating a kind of reinforcing circle. For example, the “standard” modern (Western) tuning – equal temperament – makes it easy to do some things (for example, change keys), and not so easy to do other things (for example, notate a specific interval smaller than a half-step), which affects what composers and musicians decide to do.
In my experience, the relatively-uneducated audience – in other words, those without the ear-training to “hear” whether something is “in tune” – may not consciously notice that the tuning is different, but will still tend to recognize that there is something “foreign” or “exotic” or even “unpleasant” or “noisy” about music in unfamiliar tunings.