Fortepiano by Conrad Graf, Metropolitan Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
How many notes are there in an octave? Anyone who has seen a keyboard answers twelve, and the answer has been right for about two and a half centuries. Before that, it was an open question with dizzying answers: Tosi taught fifty-five, other theorists counted thirty-one or forty-three, Newton held for fifty-three. No one was wrong, because a right answer did not exist: in the continuum of possible sounds, it was up to human beings to decide what to hear. Mozart’s father heard two different notes where our piano has a single black key.
It is the boldest chapter of Alessandro Baricco’s Breve storia eretica della musica classica, the book we are working through in instalments on these pages, and it contains the comparison that alone is worth the cover price: equal temperament, the division of the octave into twelve equal parts, all of them slightly out of tune, was the MP3 of the eighteenth century. Like the algorithm that in the 1990s emptied digital sound of much of its data, the compression to twelve notes threw away an enormous quantity of sonic material, and in exchange delivered lightness: instruments tuned once and for all across the keys, orchestras that could play together with a single grammar, a musical language that could be learned quickly and could pronounce everything. Baricco goes as far as calling it a subtle genocide of sounds, and it is not a novelist’s hyperbole: many musicians of the era lived it as a small death, and the nostalgia never fully passed, if it is true that Leopold Mozart still distinguished E-flat from D-sharp and that Schoenberg dreamed of freeing sounds from tonality without ever leaving the cage of the twelve.
The move, Baricco observes, is a constant of the species: when a scenario is exhausted, humans give up much of what they possess to gain the lightness needed to reach what they do not yet possess. With the twelve notes bought at that price, the West gave itself Rameau, Beethoven, Wagner and the Beatles. Every so often, though, it pays to remember that the keyboard is not nature: it is a compression format. And that the human ear, as anyone who sings off-key with taste demonstrates, still contains all the notes the eighteenth century threw away.