There is no purity

In tuning systems. There is a rather complex and courageous piece over on Slate about tuning systems for musical instruments. Complex because tuning is one of those things that can make your head hurt. Courageous because writing on this subject is like issuing an open invitation to every music geek in the world to tell you how wrong you are.

Anyway, what I loved about it was this line:

There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption.

That is true of a lot more than tuning. (It's not a problem, as I have said before, because purity is not a moral concept. It can look like one but it does no real work in morality. That's a subject for another day.)

Another bit stuck out for different reasons. Discussing the limitations of an earlier system called meantone tuning, author Jan Swafford writes:

In fact, those temperaments left only a few keys that were well-enough in tune to be usable: the keys between two flats and three sharps. 

That would be the keys of Bb, F, C, G, D and A. That covers about 99 percent of popular music and folk music. I wonder if anyone has tried using meantone tuning for that stuff and would it make much of a difference?