| Sumario: | In 1852, the theorist Johanna Kinkel urged musicians to "emancipate the quartertone [for] a new world of sound!" Her call to arms was quickly countered by Wolfgang Heinrich Riehl, who denigrated such "enharmonic" sounds as "effeminate" in contrast to traditional German diatonicism. This debate occurred during the contemporaneous development of experimental keyboards that could enable Kinkel's musical "emancipation," featuring up to fifty-three equally tempered divisions of the octave in approximation of the pure intervals of just intonation. This article describes two such instruments as case studies: T. P. Thompson's enharmonic organ for the "abolition" of temperament, and Tanaka Shôhei's enharmonium for the restoration of music's "natural purity." I show how the language these theorists used reveals the larger political and cultural forces shaping the late nineteenth-century development of music theory and comparative musicology and trace how their instruments were construed as tools for transnational exchange and the global promotion of European civilization.
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