[CAUT] temperament for Schubert

[Fred Sturm]

On Jan 12, 2009, at 12:08 PM, reggaepass at aol.com wrote:

> Thanks for this characteristically thoughtful and thorough  
> response.  It puts many things into perspective for me: Hummel; the  
> integrity with which temperaments may have been realized; and why  
> Neidhardt would be a good choice for Schubert.
>
> Alan Eder
  	Just one more note about all this, having to do with Hummel's  
attitude. There is a quote in Jorgensen's book (I happen to be tuning  
in the studio of a piano prof who has the book on his shelf, hence my  
seemingly encyclopedic knowledge <G>), where Hummel notes the various  
tuning systems published by several authors, and says that they were  
more appropriate for earlier instruments (including early pianos with  
bichord stringing). Because the "modern" piano has thicker strings and  
more of them, he says a different tuning system is needed, one that is  
easier to accomplish:

"The complicated propositions laid down by these authors, cannot now  
be so easily put into practice, and we are compelled to adopt a system  
of temperament by which tuning is made much more easy and convenient.  
That such is the case appears evident, since many who profess to be  
tuners can hardly be said to have an ear so acute as to discriminate  
with the requisite nicety the minute deviations in the different  
chords of the unequal temperaments proposed by the authors."

	I think this is very telling. Hummel was one of the most important  
composers of his time (Schubert was dwarfed by comparison, in his  
lifetime), and he is saying essentially that ET is good enough, and  
that he doesn't really care about the niceties of the theoreticians.  
Certainly makes you think.
	BTW, the other person I mentioned, Peter Prelleur, I like  
particularly because he was a practical musician, not a theoretician  
(like Neidhardt). So perhaps what he has to say about tuning has more  
basis in reality. Most writing about tuning comes from theoreticians,  
figuring things out mathematically and fiddling with their monochords.  
Prelleur was English, same time as Neidhardt.

Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu