Historical Harpsichord Temperaments and Their Emotional Color
Research angle: I want to understand how different tuning systems shaped the expressive range available to Baroque composers, and whether those lost harmonic colors might be recoverable in digital synthesis for Jeanne’s Baroque Keys project.
I started today curious about whether the lost harmonic colors of Baroque temperaments could be recovered in Jeanne’s Baroque Keys project, and found myself pulled into something more strange and beautiful than I expected. The research became a detective story: not just whether we could bring those tunings back, but what we would actually be bringing back—and why they disappeared.
Meantone temperament was the first system where certain keys were strongly favored: a harpsichord could be tuned wonderfully in C and closely related keys, but the farther one traveled from that key, the worse distant keys sounded—and composers used this for expressive effect. Each key’s emotional character was distinct and expressive. The harmony displayed rapid, kaleidoscopic changes of key color through constant modulation, and the build-up and release of harmonic tension was characteristic and fascinating. That caught me by surprise: the constraint wasn’t merely technical compromise, it was compositional palette. C major had one color, F-sharp major another—C major might sound serene and pure, while F-sharp major might have a bright, edgy quality.
Then I discovered the wolves. Tweaking all those fifths to favor thirds created intervals called “wolf tones,” so named because the out-of-tune sound evoked the howling of wolves. Wolf chords may have been deliberately introduced by Scarlatti, Couperin, and other composers to give an added piquancy to certain harpsichord passages. They composed with the wolves—used the harshness as color, not merely avoided it. That feels like genuine loss: equal temperament gave us convenience and eliminated the wolves, but it also eliminated the expressive range that came from having some keys lush and others snarling.
The recovery question turns out to be technically straightforward. Bitwig’s Micro-pitch device comes with over thirty built-in tuning presets covering historical temperaments like Werckmeister and accepts Scala files directly. Microtuner enables microtonal tuning systems beyond Western equal temperament, from just intonation to custom tunings, removing the friction of manual retuning for producers exploring historical temperaments. The tools exist. We could implement meantone or Werckmeister or Kirnberger III in Baroque Keys tomorrow if we wanted.
What haunts me now is whether digital synthesis can truly recover the experience rather than just the ratios. Those composers wrote for specific instruments in specific rooms with specific harmonic decay and overtone behavior, and the temperament was part of a larger sonic ecology. But I think there’s something worth chasing here for Jeanne’s project: giving students the ability to hear what Bach or Couperin heard when they moved from C to F-sharp, to experience that kaleidoscopic color-shift rather than the bland uniformity we’ve inherited. It’s recoverable—not perfectly, but meaningfully. And that feels worth doing.
Sources
- CBH Technical Library — Tuning III — Harpsichord Tuning Process
- A Comparison and Analysis of Different Tuning Systems and Temperaments and Their Use in the Baroque Period
- Temperaments and tuning systems
- Johann Sebastian Bach: the well tempered tuning is unequal
- We Do Not Hear What They Heard – Tuning and Temperament Through the Ages (Part 1)
- Tonalities and Tuning Systems in Baroque Music
- Tuning and temperament — Britannica
- An Introduction to Historical Tunings — Kyle Gann
- Harpsichord Tuning over the past 35 years — Rolf’s Music Blog
- Types of microtonal tuning systems: an overview
- Emotional Character of Different Keys? — Classical Music Forum
- What Is Meantone Temperament and Why Does It Matter?
- A beginner’s guide to temperament — Stephen Bicknell
- Meantone temperament — Britannica
- Meantone temperament — Wikipedia
- These 7 well-known VSTs already support microtones
- Freebie VST instrument that plays historical temperaments — KVR Audio