Music Wise

The past two weeks I have been looking into temperament. In the beginning I was rather ignorant about temperaments; isn't tuning an obvious thing you do to an instrument? And why not settle for one tuning that "sounds right"? There is, of course, more too it. Actually, during the Baroque era, musicians and composers experimented with harmony and with different tunings. They started to invent new tuning methods, aside from the just and Medieval Pythagorean systems. This development was probably driven by the keyboard instruments and also the harp: instruments that are not easily tuned to all keys. Playing in a different key would cause dissonant intervals, called "wolf tones". A work around was to develop a tuning system that would - for lack of a better expression - spread the dissonance over the different keys. In that way music could be adapted to all the keys. Well tempered tuning was an important invention of the Baroque era, that did just that. But, of co