After writing about Jon Hassell’s “coffee coloured” global music of the future, I was intrigued to find out that Timothy Morton, author of “Ecology Without Nature,” has been writing about the ecological implications (or something like it) of Just Intonation versus Equal Temperament.
For those unaware of the fine details of musical tuning, Just Intonation is what’s considered to be a more “natural” tuning system (based on natural harmonics) than the one we’ve gotten used to after a few hundred years of piano-dominated equal temperament. The latter mathematically divides the scale into twelve equal parts (semi-tones) and then strings them into melodies and weaves them into harmonies. But those notes are found nowhere in nature; in fact, JI aficionados argue, it takes seriously detuned ears (like ours) to hear equal-tempered music – which describes most of what passes for music on radios and iPods today – as if it were normal.
In “Ecru and beige versus magenta and blue sound”, Morton argues that Equal Temperament, typified by the piano, “hard-wires” a certain way of listening which itself “reifies inner space” into a kind of permanent “brown” – the “metastasized cancer of the bourgeois ego.” When minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley started messing with this tuning in the early 1960s, they literally “opened up the non-reified spaces within.”
