Creativity Quote by Lara St. John

There is a musician’s impatience in Lara St. John’s wording: “no earthly reason” is the kind of blunt, backstage common sense that cuts through centuries of compromise dressed up as tradition. Temperament is, historically, a deal we made with keyboards and fixed-pitch ensembles - a practical system that lets you modulate freely and still sound “in tune enough.” St. John’s point is that a solo voice or string instrument isn’t bound by those hardware limits. If your instrument can shade a note until it locks into the harmonic series, why choose the watered-down version?

The intent feels partly pedagogical, partly polemical. She’s not just advocating for “better intonation”; she’s reclaiming a whole expressive vocabulary. Pure intonation isn’t a sterile math exercise - it changes the emotional lighting of a passage. A major third tuned purely blooms. A leading tone can ache more sharply when it’s placed where the harmony demands, not where the piano says the grid is.

The subtext is a critique of institutional training and accompaniment culture: conservatories that teach singers and string players to “match the piano,” orchestral worlds that normalize tempered pitch as polite professionalism. St. John frames temperament as an unnecessary self-handicap for the very instruments that can most directly speak in resonance. It’s also a subtle flex of agency: intonation as artistic choice, not compliance. In an era where recordings expose every cent of pitch and digital tools quantize everything, she’s arguing for the opposite of correction - for alive, relational tuning that responds to harmony moment by moment.