Lou Harrison Piano Concerto

I don't want this to be a blog about temperaments, but I've discovered this whole world of temperaments and I think that it's fascinating. So you get to hear all about it!

My piano professor recommended this piano concerto to me. It's composed and performed using a tuning called Kirnberger II temperament. I'll talk more about that in a bit, but I want to give a background on the composer. Lou Harrison was an American composer whose life spanned most of the 20th century. As far as I know, he's not terribly well-known, but then again, I don't know a whole lot about contemporary American composers. His music tends to focus more on rhythm and melody, rather than harmony. His music, at least this piano concerto, reminds me a bit of Copland. Just a bit.

The piano concerto was written for the pianist Keith Jarrett, who, incidentally, was a famous jazz pianist. (As a side note, I want to start writing about jazz, but as of right now have only the vaguest knowledge of it. Give me time though, it'll start to pop up in this blog.) As I mentioned before, it uses the Kirnberger II temperament. It was developed in the 18th century by a German theorist and composer named Johann Philipp Kirnberger. Recall that the ideal tuning would be acoustically pure fifths. This can't really be done because when you tune from C to C, up in pure fifths, you don't have a real C by the time you get to the top. However, Kirnberger wanted to get as close to this as possible. To compensate, he shrunk two of the fifths, while the other fifths remained pure. He was also able to keep three pure thirds, the rest being slightly wider. If you go to the Wikipedia article, it's got a helpful little graph.

Anyway, the concerto in itself is really lovely. Movement 1-Part 1, Movement 1-Part 2, Movement 2, Movement 3, Movement 4. I urge you to listen to the whole thing. Of course, I always urge you to listen to the entire piece, but don't stop at the first movement with this one. It's so American, particularly the fourth movement, I think. It's most definitely my favorite piece of the moment. It's a bit difficult (for me, anyway) to hear the difference in temperament, because the differences are so incredibly minute. It's subtle, but a bit richer, as are most of the non-equal-tempered pieces which I've listened to lately.