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Piano Pages
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Any musical instrument has “built in” qualities that determine the tone that it is capable of producing. But the production of tone and intonation in performance is not of course, wholly a matter of the quality of the instrument. It is also dependent on the player. How the player produces tone and intonation is not an equal issue for all instruments. In the case of string players, for example, tone and intonation are very directly under the control of the player in such a way that demands a good deal of skill, if good intonation and tone are to be produced. The tone and intonation produced on even a Stradivarius violin will invariably not sound particularly good when the instrument is only in the hands of a novice. A clarinet or a trumpet will not just obligingly produce a beautifully toned note when the novice attempts to play one.
At least for the novice pianist, the intonation and a large part of the available tone is already provided in the tuning of the instrument. Tuning is not something the pianist has to accomplish beforehand, but rather, is provided by a specialist - the piano tuner. Whilst a pianist notices a deterioration in the tone of the instrument when the tuning is poor, the fact that the design of the instrument with more than one string per note, enables positive tone production by the tuner, is often overlooked or taken for granted.
Historically, and not least because of the long “tradition” of idealised theory concerning musical temperament, whose roots have more connection with ancient philosophy than rigorous acoustics, intonation and tone have often been assumed to be connected in a somewhat simplistic, idealised way. So it is that the task of tuning has so often been considered only in terms of temperament, as if temperament, or the various “sizing” of musical intervals understood as ratios, were the only factor that plays a part in tone and intonation. In reality, in piano tuning, temperament, that is, tuning of according to that notion called equal temperament, is a question of the basic technical merit that is expected in the art of tuning, but it does not determine the tone and intonation of a piano as a whole. Given basic technical merit in the tuning of equal temperament, tone and intonation very much requires something else. It is far more dependent on the tuning of the individual notes (which contain more than one string) and the tuning of the octaves and their compounds, and this is something about which much focused-on temperament theory says absolutely nothing of any consequence. According to temperament theory, these are simply untempered.
There is indeed a thing called technical merit, that is present (or absent) in piano tuning, just as there is technical merit (or the lack of it) in a fine art painting, or in musical instrument making. Technical merit or its absence in a painting or the construction of a musical instrument is obvious to a master painter or instrument maker, and technical merit (or its absence) in a piano tuning is obvious to expert tuners. But technical merit, though an essential beginning, in any art only goes so far.
In piano tuning, technical merit is usually judged in terms of beat rates in tempered intervals, where the beats are certain fluctuation patterns within the soundscapes of certain intervals. Yet even the best musicians who are not tuners, are not, in general, even aware of these beat rates! Is the beauty of a piano’s tone and intonation judged in music, or by the musician, in terms of beat rates? Absolutely not. The piano is judged, quite rightly, by the beauty of its tone and intonation. Does beauty of tone and intonation map simply and directly from specific beat rates? Absolutely not, not least, because the very concept of a beat rate is itself only an approximate notion of what the actual acoustical phenomena consist of. It is a concept from 19th century acoustics, if you like, a semi-scientific rough guide to tone and intonation, and very rough it is too, compared to the musical reality of tone and intonation. The latter is as much a matter of psycho-acoustics as of acoustics, and both are immensely more complex than the straightforward concept of the beat rate. Beat rates are, to be sure, an important concept in tuning, but the production of real tone and intonation requires much more than the application of a limited tool.
Many aural piano tuners might imagine their hearing is somehow “better” than that of the musician who is not a “trained” tuner, purely because they have been trained to hear beating, while the musician, poor thing, hears only tone and intonation. This in itself, in relation just to beating, is a delusion. It is absolutely true that if you hear beating and control it well in piano tuning, with sufficient technical merit, many musicians will be satisfied with the resultant tone and intonation. But this doesn’t make your appreciation of tone and intonation any better. It is a trick, a technique, rather like “painting with numbers”, where all you have to do is put the designated colour paint in each numbered space. Nevertheless, and perhaps amazingly, the trained tuner always still seems to have the advantage over the musician who does not hear beat rates, even if the tuner has no real appreciation of tone and intonation, when in comes to the practical task of tuning. How is this?
It turns out that tuning is not a simple question of musical pitches, but is actually an acoustical puzzle, when you come to try to tune a complete network of musical intervals forming a complete scale. If you don’t solve the puzzle, the puzzle in effect wins over your attempt to tune the network of intervals, and one or more intervals will be unsatisfactory in tone and intonation. The awareness of this puzzle is at least as old as the Pythagoreans, and most probably older. When it comes to trying to put the idea of equal temperament into practice, tone and intonation judgments on their own do not solve the puzzle of the network. Musical tone and intonation are, indeed, perceived musical qualities, and are not really measurable quantities. They are a question of art, and the solving of the puzzle seems to require more than artistic judgments. Beat rates, it turns out, are quantities that enable successful solving of the puzzle.
Now this is not really so difficult to appreciate. In painting, one must get the geometrical perspective right. Sciagraphy, the positioning of light and shadow, must be “realistic”. These are easily solvable with a little quantitative, scientific knowledge, some measurement or aligning of angles, some drawing of geometrical lines, following certain principles. At an early stage in the work these may look more like an exercise in science or mathematics than the creation of an art work. But they are necessary for the underlying technical merit. So it is with beat rates. They are not arranged in the way they are, in tuning, in order to represent some natural reality like perspective or light, but they are “scientifically” arranged specifically to solve the puzzle of tuning a network of intervals, to provide a specific solution called equal temperament. The arrangement of beat rates used in tuning, is for the solving of the puzzle, and is not, contrary to popular supposition, for the production of tone and intonation. A certain amount of tone and intonation will be produced by merely arranging beat rates, but this is not where the art of tuning lies. Arranging beat rates is only an underlying technique, like geometric pencil lines on the canvass beneath the paint. Of course, in learning to tune, beat rates are an essential route through to the refining of aural perception and the understanding of the nature of piano tone. But they are the means, not the end. As in any art, one first has to learn the techniques, the technical merit.
In art, a good painting, in order to be beautiful, goes distinctly beyond technical merit, although it usually must have technical merit as its foundation. A good musical instrument, also, must have certain technical construction features properly in place first. These are the instrument’s technical merit, showing the technical skills and knowledge of the maker. But it’s not just these technical features that distinguish, for example, the Stradivarius from the mediocre violin. Similarly, it’s not just an artist’s use of perspective, sciagraphy, or colour theory, that makes a beautiful painting. Piano tuning may not be classified as a fine art, but it can, and should most definitely go beyond any mere technical merit associated with it. As an art, it goes well beyond specified beat rates.
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