Grove Music Online

Pythagorean intonation
Mark Lindley

https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.22604
Published in print: 20 January 2001
Published online: 2001

A tuning of the scale in which all 5ths and 4ths are pure
(untempered). Pythagorean tuning provides intonations of several
types of scale. A series of five 5ths and 4ths includes the pitch
classes of the most familiar kind of pentatonic scale; ascending from
F♯ the series would comprise the five chromatic notes of the
keyboard. A series of seven 5ths ascending from F yields a diatonic
scale comprising the naturals on the keyboard; the 3rds and 6ths in
this scale, however, differ from their justly intoned equivalents by a
syntonic comma, and therefore do not meet medieval and
Renaissance criteria of consonance implied by such terms as
‘perfection’ and ‘unity’. When used as harmonic intervals these
Pythagorean 3rds and 6ths are likely to be characterized, on an
organ Diapason stop for example, by rather prominent Beats; middle
C–E or C–A beat more than 16 times per second at modern concert
pitch. A series of 12 Pythagorean 5ths provides a fully chromatic
scale that is bound to include, however, one sour Wolf 5th, smaller
than pure by a Pythagorean comma.

Traditional Pythagorean theory is a matter of string-length ratios (on

the Monochord) between multiples of 2 and 3, but of no larger prime
numbers. (For ancient, medieval and Renaissance theorists the
larger number in each ratio normally represented the greater string
length and thus the lower pitch.) The ratio for the octave is 2:1, and
for the 5th 3:2. To find the ratio for the sum of two intervals their
ratios are multiplied; to find the ratio for the intervallic difference,
the ratios are divided. The ratio for the 4th is 4:3 (octave – 5th,
hence 2:1 ÷ 3:2); for the whole tone, 9:8 (5th – 4th, hence 3:2 ÷ 4:3);
for the major 6th, 27:16 (5th + whole tone, hence 3:2 × 9:8); for the
minor 3rd, 32:27 (octave – major 6th, hence 2:1 ÷ 27:16, or 4th –
whole tone, hence 4:3 ÷ 9:8); for the ‘ditone’ or major 3rd, 81:64
(whole tone + whole tone, hence 9:8 × 9:8); for the ‘limma’ or
diatonic minor 2nd, 256:243 (4th – major 3rd, hence 4:3 ÷ 81:64);
for the somewhat larger ‘apotomē’, 2187:2048 (whole tone – limma,
hence 9:8 ÷ 256:243) and so on.

Among regular tuning systems Pythagorean intonation has the

largest major 2nds and 3rds and smallest minor 2nds and 3rds.
Melodically the large major 2nds are handsome and the incisiveness
of the small minor 2nds is of potential expressive value. Hence
Pythagorean intonation is well suited not only to parallel organum
but also to late Gothic polyphonic compositions in which the role of
harmonic major 6ths is somewhat analogous to that of dominant 7th
chords in later triadic music, while the use of double leading-note
cadences, as in ex.1, places a premium on the incisive melodic

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 quality of the small semitones. Medieval theorists who discussed
intervallic ratios nearly always did so in terms of Pythagorean
intonation.

Ex.1 Adam de la Halle: Tant con je vivrai

Of particular significance for the development of harmony in

Western music was the use of Pythagorean intonation on early
Renaissance keyboard instruments. The repertory of the
Robertsbridge Codex (GB-Lbl Add.28550) shows that a fully
chromatic keyboard was in use by about 1340, and passages like ex.
2 suggest that at that time the tuner would set the chromatic scale
by adding pure 5ths at both ends of the chain of 5ths forming the
chromatic scale, leaving the wolf 5th perhaps between G♯ and E♭.
But by the time of the early 15th-century liturgical keyboard
repertory of the Faenza Codex (I-FZc 117), the five chromatic notes
seem to have been tuned to make a chain of pure 5ths among
themselves, leaving the wolf 5th between B and F♯. It happens that
what might be called a Pythagorean diminished 4th (e.g. the interval
between the first and last members of the following chain of pure
5ths or 4ths: B–E–A–D–G–C–F–B♭–E♭) actually forms a much more
nearly pure major 3rd than does the diatonic Pythagorean 3rd itself.
Hence all the triangles in fig.1 would represent virtually pure triads,
or at least particularly sonorous ones, if all the 5ths shown in the
spiral were tuned pure (with special care to make none larger than
pure). In this disposition of Pythagorean intonation, which may be
referred to conveniently as the F♯ × B disposition, each of the five
chromatic degrees falls within the lower half of the diatonic whole
tone. This disposition was prescribed or referred to by numerous
15th-century theorists, including Prosdocimus de Beldemandis,
Ugolino of Orvieto, Johannes Keck, Henri Arnaut de Zwolle, a certain
‘librum Baudeceti’ cited by Arnaut, Johannes Gallicus, John Hothby
(referring specifically to the organ), Nicolò Burzio, Franchinus
Gaffurius (in his Theorica musica of 1492), and Heinrich Schreiber;
its traces are also found in the 1476 portrayal of a clavichord in the
ducal palace at Urbino (see Clavichord, fig.3). There is corroborating
musical evidence, mostly from the first half of the century: exx.3a
and b, the conclusions of two organ verses, are typical of the
evidence to be found in the liturgical Faenza Codex repertory. Exx.4
and 5 are from two settings in the Buxheim Organbook (D-Mbs
3725) of Binchois’ Adieu ma tres belle; other pieces in the Buxheim
repertory that exploit the especially resonant triads of the F♯ × B
disposition of Pythagorean intonation include nos.19, 30–31, 126–8,
141, 153–5, 180 and 242. Most of these are keyboard settings of
songs initially composed in the first half of the 15th century. (Most of
the original keyboard compositions in the Buxheim Organbook,

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 including all the fundamenta, seem to require some form of regular
mean-tone temperament for their proper effect; see Temperaments.)
The cadence in ex.6, the opening of a Buxheim transcription of Du
Fay’s Mille bon jours, would not have, in the F♯ × B disposition, the
high leading note cited above as a virtue of Pythagorean intonation
in Gothic cadences; nonetheless the pure or nearly pure intonation
of the quasi-dominant triad sounds very good in this and other such
Dorian contexts. The F♯ × B disposition of Pythagorean intonation, in
addition to having perhaps abetted the development of tonality by
promoting what might anachronistically be called half-cadences in
the Dorian mode, evidently whetted that Renaissance appetite for
sonorous triads which only mean-tone temperaments could fully
satisfy on keyboard instruments.

Ex.2 Robertsbridge Codex

Ex.3 Faenza Codex

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 Ex.4 Buxheim Organbook, no.196

Ex.5 Buxheim Organbook, no.144

Ex.6 Buxheim Organbook, no.127

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 Virtually pure 3rds in Pythagorean intonation on a 12-note keyboard
instrument with the wolf 5th between B and F♯

Although Gaffurius and other late 15th-century opponents of the

theoretical innovations advanced by Ramis de Pareia cited the
Pythagorean F♯ × B scheme as the proper alternative to Ramos’s
new monochord, Gaffurius in 1500 changed to an ostensibly
Pythagorean monochord of 14 pitch classes forming a chain of 5ths
ascending from A♭ to D♯. In 1496 Gaffurius had acknowledged,
however, that organists tempered their 5ths when tuning the
instrument. Pietro Aaron and G.M. Lanfranco, the first Italian
writers to give tuning instructions for mean-tone temperaments (in
1523 and 1532 respectively), were, like Gaffurius, unabashed
upholders of Pythagorean theory in contradiction to their own
descriptions of practice. This dichotomy between ‘speculative’ and
practical accounts of musical intervals became so pronounced
during the 16th century that when Simon Stevin, the Dutch
mathematician and engineer, worked out his precise calculations for
equal temperament around 1600, he was familiar with Pythagorean
theory but only dimly aware of the existence of mean-tone
temperaments, which were subsequently described to him by a
musician friend, Abraham Verheyen.

Bibliography
Boethius: De institutione musica (Venice, 1491–2); Eng.
trans. C.M. Bowen in C.V. Palisca, ed.: Boethius:
Fundamentals of Music (New Haven, CT, 1989)

C.E. Naumann: Über die verschiedenen Bestimmungen

der Tonverhältnisse und die Bedeutung des
pythagoreischen oder reinen Quinten-Systems für unsere
heutige Musik (Leipzig, 1858)

J.M. Barbour: ‘The Persistence of the Pythagorean Tuning

System’, Scripta mathematica, 1 (1932–3), 286

H. Stephani: Zur Psychologie des musikalischen Hörens

(Regensburg, 1956)

M. Kolinski: ‘A New Equi-Distant 12-Tone Temperament’,

JAMS, 12 (1959), 210–14
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 C.V. Palisca: Girolamo Mei: Letters on Ancient and Modern
Music (Rome, 1960)

F.R. Levin: The Harmonics of Nicomachus and the

Pythagorean Tradition (Philadelphia, 1975)

B. Münxelhaus: Pythagoras musicus (Bonn, 1976)

E.C. Pepe: ‘Pythagorean Tuning and its Implications for

the Music of the Middle Ages’, The Courant, 1/2 (1983), 3–
16
For further bibliography see Temperaments and Just
intonation.

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