The Unpainted Pots of Mohenjo-daro

In college in the 1970s, I took an Asian art history overview class. The professor, a calm, diminutive Caucasian man, was also a Buddhist priest. For one lesson, he taught us about Mohenjo-daro, a city in the Indus Valley civilization of 2500 BCE in what is now Pakistan. This  site is famous for its great store of intact pottery vessels, and truly massive collection of potshards. My professor said, “A small number of painted pots were found in Mohenjo-daro, and also a great number of unpainted pots. Archaeological research has been focussed in the reverse proportion; much more attention is paid to the painted pots. I myself am more interested in the unpainted pots.”

As  a young student, I found this puzzling. Wouldn't anyone’s curiosity naturally be more stirred by the painted pots? They were rare, pretty, fancy, and must have been expensive. How could they not be more intriguing than the quotidian heap? But my professor had made this remark with such serene simplicity that it stayed in my mind for decades. Now, as I pursue the history of tuning systems, I am finally understanding his point of view. There are so many 'painted pots' to be found in the study of musical scales; the four ancient Greek species of tetrachords with their finely-sliced semitones, the Arabic and Persian modes, the Indian ragas, Japanese koto tunings, Chinese pitch-pipes; it seems an endless feast of musical complexity. It is difficult to grasp this overwhelming multitude of choices --  but the volume, the persistence, and the importance of the unpainted pots is still much greater.

The 'unpainted pots' of music are the simple patterns that vibrating strings and air columns produce. Human ears and brains perceive those patterns as the same building-block intervals that the Pythagoreans found on their monochords. In his towering 1863 treatise On the Sensations of Tone, Hermann von Helmholtz lays out, in mathematical detail, all of the scales and tunings mentioned above, along with many others. In the same book, he also asserts that “The relationship of the Fifth, and its inversion the Fourth, to the fundamental tone, is so close that it has been acknowledged in all known systems of music. On the other hand, many variations occur in the choice of the intermediate tones which have to be inserted between the terminal tones of the tetrachord.”

Flavors are fun, but food groups are essential. LAMPTM Tuning and Temperament apps explore the building blocks of music. We can use these unpainted pots to cook elaborate dishes from whichever cultural menu we prefer.