The old imdb Werckmeister board was probably my favorite corner of the internet. So many thought provoking discussions and interpretations of this film.

Anyway if anyone has seen this movie, let's kick start a discussion about the titular Werckmeister harmonies, or even tempered tuning (piano, guitar) as opposed to natural tuning (voice, strings, horns).

To recap, Werckmeister was the guy who advocated moving to the even tempered scales we use in 90% of popular music today. The problem is it's wrong. It's a fudging, or "rounding up" of the imperfect nature of music, resulting in perfectly ordered octaves that repeat every 12 notes. But real music doesn't work that way. Thus the analogy is made in this movie: we have created human institutions and systems of order that are at odds with nature. And the result will ultimately prove catastrophic.

As a musician who plays both the piano (even tempered) and cello (natural tuning), this is a BIG issue with me! I've tried tuning a piano to the natural scale, and it sounds mostly awesome but as you can guess certain chords sound like trainwrecks. At the same time, I hate even tempered tuning because we are robbing ourselves of pure intervals. That's why a choir of voices (natural tuning) will always sound more heavenly than an even tempered instrument like the piano. My point being, there is no solution that I know of.

The movie seems to imply that the solution would be to forsake the corrupted human system of order, which always ends in mayhem, and embrace the natural system symbolized by the whale which outlives them all. Philosophically sounds good. But practically (and musically) it doesn't work that way.