Quartertone pianos - Two become one

an introduction

“Less is more.”

Few musical slogans have been pushed more over the last few decades, and this paradigm has surely produced some beautiful results. Only, what kind of “less” are we talking about really? Why do we want less? What if that “less” were not a free choice, but rather a tradition or even a forced idiom, like a parade in which the participants are marching blindly?

One of those “parades” would be the choice to use some pitches and others not. This system, dominant in Western Europe, is known as the well-tempered pitch. Simply put, it includes the notes that we know as the white and black keys on a piano keyboard. The system has more or less shaped Western musical tradition since the 18th century, from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier over the sonorous ostentation of Wagner’s operas, to indeed “Do Re Mi” from The Sound of Music. So the system works. Only, to what end? And to what end not? Because the piano keyboard and the thinking that goes with it, leaves a lot of options unused.

The A-key in the middle of a keyboard is tuned at 440 Hz. The following note, closest to it (a semitone away), at roughly 466 Hz. So what happened to the twenty-six other frequencies? Why are those not used? Or, put differently, why would a 453-Hz tone be wrong? If melody and rhythm are the first and second dimensions of music, then harmony would be the third, spatial dimension.

Microtonality, the use of tones in between the tones of the well-tempered system, can then add a fourth dimension. One that can already be heard in a lot of music, often quite distinguished: think of Chinese opera, the refined melodies from the Middle East, or the well-known “blue notes.” But also in the West we have come to realize that there is more than do-re-mi, with Harry Partch, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Giacinto Scelsi and Pascal Dusapin, or EDM-stars Boards of Canada. To name just a few. Now that’s all very well, but how do you handle all of this, as a musician who plays the well-tempered instrument par excellence, the piano? For Seppe Gebruers the solution is as simple and obvious as it is complex and bold. By using two pianos instead, one of which is tuned a quartertone lower, which allows the playing of intermediate tones, next to the classical ones. Music in 4D, where “more” is just that: more.