* 
70 On Perfect Musical Intonation. 
“ After all, the subject is but just begun. I have been led to 
ravel in some beautiful regions, unknown to such as had con- 
fined themselves to the hi But larger discoveries remain 
yet to be made by those who shall, with more zeal and better 
qualifications, follow out the track in which it has fallen to my 
lot to go a little way before them.” 
e manner in which the subject of the musical scale and 
discreditable to music, as claiming to be a science. It is evident 
that the fundamental basis of music 1s not understood by those 
who attempt to teach the science. If it were necessary to cor- 
roborate this statement, we could refer to the blind and mysteri- 
ous manner in which “temperament” is treated by modern theo- 
retical writers. In this, which is simply an arbitrary ee 
of a false note for two or more true notes, some writers have s 
an “inexhaustible fountain of variety,” ‘awful grandeur,” ‘ol 
“exquisite beauty,” while an a writer calls it an “‘inexplica- 
ble difficulty which no one has attempted to solve; the Deity 
seems to have left music in an eufieeived state, to show his in- 
scrutable power’ !* Temperament is au arrangement of economy 
by which a small number of sounds ( usually twelve to the oc- 
tave) are made to answer (imperfectly of course) for the much 
larger number which would be required to give music in tune in 
the usual number of keys. This arrangement was originally 
submitted to, merely for the accommodation of the instrument- 
maker and the player. So lo ong as no mechanism had been in- 
vented by which more than twelve sounds could be managed by 
the organist, temperament was necessary in instruments of this 
class, but this reason no longer exists, as we shall show further 
on in this paper. ‘Temperament has always been considered, by 
the great masters, as an evil attendant upon the “ present imper- 
fect state of instrumentation,”+ and hence they preferred that their 
instrumental music should be performed by skillful artists on vio- 
lins and other instruments which admit of perfect intonation ; an 
these have held, to the present day, their rank as the leading and 
most important instruments in the orchestra. It would have in- 
structed a composer like Beethoven, or an artist like Paganini, to . 
have heard of the scale of a modern German theorist, Kollmann, 
which he calls the “scale of nature,” consisting “of twelve sounds 
in the octave placed at equal distances, ” on which “ wonderful 
compound of twelve diatonic, chromatic, enharmonic scales in 
one,” he declares “all modern music depends. * {Phe somewhat 
voluminous treatise of Gottfried Weber, on ‘musical composition,” 
has recently been translated in this country, and has been praise 
as a scientific work. The basis from which Weber a to 
- * Gardiner's Music of Nature, Pp 433, Bost. ed, 183'7. + Beethoven. 
” 
