Creativity Quote by Lara St. John

There’s a quiet flex in Lara St. John framing “pure harmonics” as the historical baseline, as if music theory isn’t merely a set of conventions but a record of physics asserting itself. Coming from a working musician rather than a theorist, the line reads less like a textbook claim and more like an appeal to legitimacy: if you want to understand why certain intervals feel stable, or why some tunings sound “right,” start with the overtone series, not the piano keyboard.

The intent is corrective. Modern listeners are often raised on equal temperament (the standardized compromise that lets you play in every key), so we treat today’s scale as inevitable. St. John nudges the reader back to an older, messier truth: scale systems across cultures didn’t begin as abstract grids; they began as people chasing the clean relationships already embedded in vibrating strings and air columns. “Historically” does a lot of work here, widening her claim beyond Western art music and implying that the ear’s attraction to simple ratios is a recurring human discovery, not a European invention.

The subtext is a subtle critique of our industrial musical present. Equal temperament is practical, portable, and slightly “impure.” By invoking pure harmonics, she’s also invoking a lost intimacy with resonance - with instruments, rooms, bodies - and suggesting that some of what we call taste is really acclimation to a compromise. It’s not nostalgia; it’s a reminder that music’s rules were first negotiated with nature, then with the marketplace.