The Tempered Guitar

Petri Kumela’s twelfth album, The Tempered Guitar, is an extraordinary exploration of microtonality and the purity of musical keys. On this new release, Baroque masterpieces and contemporary Finnish works are performed on a custom-built microtonal guitar that illuminates the most delicate shades of pitch.

A Mycelial Web of Notes and Epochal Dialogue

The Tempered Guitar boldly intertwines historical tuning systems with the experimentalism of contemporary music. The repertoire is built around modern works by Sebastian Hilli and Jukka Tiensuu, paired with Baroque compositions by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre and J. S. Bach.

As composer Lauri Supponen elegantly outlines in the album’s liner notes, tempering requires an ear for proportions:

No note is in tune all by itself but in relation to another note. Like ecology, tempering is concerned with interaction. Think of a mycelial web of notes.

The choice of works is deeply rooted in historical and artistic narratives. Raised at the court of Versailles, Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre devoted her life to music and the King of France; her unruly Chaconne from the Suite in D minor appropriately bears the nickname L'inconstante. Sebastian Hilli's The Tempered Suite bridges the danceable nature of the French Baroque suite with modern-day sensibilities, incorporating EDM genres from trance to house that emerged three hundred years later. Jukka Tiensuu's Utuhuntu employs the guitar's scordatura tuning to create an elegant, kaleidoscopic mist. J. S. Bach’s Sonata in G minor ties the album together using the Kirnberger III temperament, preserving the beauty of the original thirds.

Petri Kumela – A Boundary Breaker

Nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize, Petri Kumela stands as one of Finland's most original and versatile classical guitarists. He has firmly established himself as a maverick, moving seamlessly between period instruments, contemporary music, and the electric guitar. For this album, he plays a guitar built by Italian luthier Gabriele Lodi, retrofitted with a microtonal fretboard featuring movable frets by piano technician Matthias Grohn. This innovation accommodates historically accurate, piece-specific temperaments—ranging from quarter-comma meantone to a modified témperament ordinaire.

To quote Lauri Supponen once more:

If you cannot hear in what way Petri’s arrangement of the Sonata in G minor is microtonal, then Petri has succeeded in his sleight of hand.