The Rape of Chopin
by Angus Verspeeten
Page 1 of 7

ILL-TEMPERED MUSIC
To be human is to experience injustice. Injustices large and small, painful and expensive, fill the daily news.

Innocently, we have all for the past hundred years been subject to a massive musical injustice, one which universally changed the way we hear music as well as the way performers play music.

This injustice is known as "equal temperament."

Non-music-lovers can stop reading at this point, unless they delight in the suffering of others. You, the music lover, should continue reading. You are about to feel, rightly and righteously, affronted, cheated, misled, tricked, esthetically bamboozled.

The 20^th century assaulted our ears with performed and recorded music. For the music lover it was, or should have been, a paradisiacal century. So much glorious organized sound, so readily and repeatedly available. And so cheap. Great music that had once been the province only of the rich and the privileged, in the last century became a vast democratic domain. The ears of the lowliest could be soothed at any moment by Mozart.

Paradise enou, surely.

"Eden enou" would be more accurate, because there was, you see, this snake, this thing, this distorting lie called "equal temperament" which conditioned all our ears, from the lowliest to the most talented, to hear and accept the falsely tuned piano, and with that, to accept falsely tuned music universally, as proper, correct, and good.