"A Tempered Tale of Tone" by Milton Horne

“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”  

Cardinal Newman, "Conscience, Consensus, and Development of Doctrine.”

At their regular Monday coffee meeting, three long-time friends sipped hot drinks and mused over the coming week's possible changes. It seems that foremost in everyone's mind was the upcoming decision concerning which kind of temperament should ground standard international tonality. Trey, a long-time supporter of the purity party, was trying to convince Otto that mathematical purity in intervals, (especially the thirds) should be the criterion by which tonality was determined. Otto, a member of the "wellness" party, was insisting on compromise among the intervals along the lines of inclusivity and greater creativity through diversity. Otto gently reminded Trey that pure thirds meant narrow octaves and that the resulting tonality across seven octaves meant that Cs 5-7 sounded "flat.” Trey was unmoved, believing that the purity of nature in tonality simply must be uncompromisingly observed.

Quint, the youngest of the three, listened quietly to the friendly debate over the competing philosophies of tonality, aware of his own love of pure fifths, thus having an affinity with the purity party himself  (though, not necessarily enjoying truck with those somewhat pushy thirds, whose purity limited the purity of fifths). But Quint's love of pure octaves made him realize that to have pure octaves he himself, as a member of the compromise party, must give up some of his own purity to have pure octaves (narrower fifths, in other words). Quint sipped from his cup and mentioned again to Trey that pure thirds not only limited octaves, but fifths as well, and he did not think that such excessive dominance of pure thirds was warranted in nature, despite the mathematics of the matter. Seeing Quint as an ally in this frequently rehearsed friendly debate, Otto piped up again to remind that since wellness strives for equity among the intervals, it already had affinities with compromise. Trey, audibly though not aggressively, used the sound of her cup being set on the table to assert that if they abandoned the guideline of nature and mathematics, a lack of clarity would ensue. Moreover, she insisted, we sacrifice so much pure beauty when we abandon the purity of thirds to include fifths and octaves.

All the while this spirited but friendly (and ancient) debate was going on, Trey, Quint, and Otto were oblivious to the conversations going on at tables nearby: at one, the composers were joined by the performers and the tuners who were themselves engaged in the questions of tonality, because they, too, would be affected by the week's decision. Not surprisingly, they were debating which of them played a superior role in maintaining proper standards of tonality. It never occurred to any who were drinking coffee that day that all of them had already made up their minds and were unwilling to change.