Lesson Four: Standard Tunings and Variations

The last lesson explored the work of artists like guitarist James Blood Ulmer, who uses non-standard tunings and forms when composing and playing music. This approach was compared to that of the manufacturers of military marching band tubas, who sought to bring all the instruments into the same structure and order. 

Today, we start with more specific info about standard tunings. And we're going to start with. . .the piano.

"WHAAAAT?!?" I hear you shouting. "There are no piano tunings, except with a wrench! The piano has all the notes!!"

Ah, does it, though? Does it have them all? Could it possibly have too many, or the wrong ones for a particular musician's needs?

First off, we've got the 88-key factor. This physical structure of a piano spans the gap between the question of tunings and that of the range of the instrument. Why 88 keys? And why do piano keyboards begin with A and end on C?

The answer to that set of questions is surprisingly arbitrary. When keyboards modernized from harpsichord and clavichord to the modern piano, the makers used the arm lengths of what they thought was an average man. Great if you are that size; not so great if you are any other size. This still happens with driver's seats designed for cars -- a woman who's five feet tall has to sit on a a cushion and a man who's six feet six has to hunch over the steering wheel like a circus bear riding a tricycle.) At some point the decision of low A at the bass end to high C at the treble end became the industry standard. Then the electronic keyboard was invented and now keyboards are, like eight keys, or 48 keys, or 54 keys. Some keys that hardly ever get used at the very ends get left off. 

So you can see that the design for the length of the keyboard is pretty random, and it changes. It was shorter when the clavichord was the hot new thing, then it was longer when the grand piano took over ballrooms in mansions, then it got shorter again when people wanted to bring a keyboard by subway to a gig. (Or have the subway trip be the gig.)

Why does this matter? Well, in part, it's to help everyone relax. Although people who take music very, very seriously will explain and explain how important the rules are, you can see that people do what they want. In jazz guitar, if you don't like your options, you can push down on the "wrong" fret and claim that you are playing a minor thirteenth diminished something or other, and it probably is if you look at enough fretboard diagrams. I'm not saying that music has no rules; I'm saying that people invent rules and change them, and that it's up to us whether we want to recognize ourselves as rule-makers and rule-breakers or both.

Now that we (sort of) know why the piano keyboard is the length that it is, why are there approximately that many keys and why are they in that order, with lots of white keys and a few black ones? The answer is. . .cultural preference. 

Can you believe it? Another set of random choices by humans. Oh, sure, there's Pythagorean math. One takes a sound and by applying a ratio (by pressing down in the right spot on an instrument's string), one gets a higher version of that same note which rings in perfect unison with it. The octave, right?

I'm not denying that some of the intervals (the stair steps of the musical scale) aren't based in math. But some of them aren't. And there have been many, many arguments about that. 

Let's say you own a two-story house and you knock out the current set of stairs and decide to build new ones. And let's say that the building code requires you to put one stair tread in a certain spot and another tread in a different predetermined spot. (Now in real life, of course, the codes are really strict about how stairs are built, but let's pretend it's all be deregulated and you want to build the steps the way that makes sense to you even if you might break your neck later.)

Well, whether you are filling in notes between a note and the higher octave, or whether you are building steps from the first floor to the second floor, now you have gaps to fill. And you probably would start with how many stair steps you want. And this is where the cultural preferences begin. Because in music, people use different numbers of notes to fill in between a note and the higher, next-octave version of that note. In Europe and America, we say there are seven non-repeating notes in a scale, not counting the higher octave note. But in Asia, the five-note scale is commonly used. It's suitable for creative exploration of basic elements, in the way that traditional Asian painting styles use deliberately simple forms and strokes to let the artist say something within the structure. Here's some five-tone music: 

The sacred music of India takes  an entirely different approach. There are lots and lots of musical patterns calledragas, with micro-scaled notes. Dedicated people learn these by heart. Instead of skipping all the sounds between one piano key and another, as Western music does, skilled Indian musicians learn and practice to keep the sounds in perfect order. This includes many harmonics and also the shifts in tone from note to note. In Western music, we don't want to hear any in-between sounds, just clear individual notes. But ragas have a very full sound, with the note changes harmonizing and chiming as each instrument contributes. Very lovely music, very real, but you can't correctly play it on a piano because you don't have all the notes you need. Here's a video featuring an example of a classical raga.

So, as I hope you can see from this lesson, even with a piano, which theoretically isn't in a particular "tuning," people have made choices about including notes and deciding where they go, and then which of these notes sound right. 

And you know, even if everyone thinks that the number of piano keys is just right and the Western system of major and minor scales is just the ticket, you've got the reality of how a particular piano sounds. A few years ago, I saw someone in a beat-up derby hat with sleeve garters on his upper arms on a New Orleans street, where he was unloading an old upright by rolling it down two boards serving as a makeshift ramp from the bed of a pickup truck. in a light rain. And the street was cobblestone, so that big wooden box of strings and levers didn't land any too gently. I wasn't able to stay for the performance, but I bet that battered upright sounded good as the guy in the derby banged out some barrelhouse and some boogie-woogie for the summer visitors to his city. Not conservatory good, but street piano good.  Here's another guy in a hat playing the piano on the street in NOLA.

Tomorrow: Guitar Tunings and Scale Length