Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:41:07 -0500: "Jeff Tanner" <tannertuner at bellsouth.net> wrote: > Subject: Re: [CAUT] > To: <caut at ptg.org> > Message-ID: <1CB94AF9E50148AFB93DF6C607FD125C at JeffTannerPC> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > I'm no scholar on the subject, but I look at all the arguments presented and apply a large dose of practicality. > Jeff, You are looking at the issues from the 20th-21st century perspective. Plus, there is a factor here that has not been mentioned in this discussion, to my knowledge - when exactly the idea of key color was current, and what might have happened to it later and why... Key color and key differences are quite important in the Baroque era (17th and 18th centuries - roughly early 1600's to mid 1800)'s. This is when you find discussions of "affects" (which is how the idea of key color/key feeling was referred to). Once you get well into the 18th century there isn't much written about it. The question then becomes, is it because these consideration have become so routinely accepted that there is no need to discuss them any more, or is it because the notion has come into disuse? And once you get into the pre-Classical and Classical era, are these notions falling completely into disuse, or are they still persisting? It's an interesting discussion and there is no way to resolve it. You will note , however, that certain keys remain firmly associated with certain moods well into the 20th century. Some are "happy" keys (I challenge you to find a sad or contemplative piece written in G-major, or highly emotional music in C-major) and others are used almost exclusively for more emotional, contemplative or sad music all the way through Mahler, as far as I can tell. So you can't dismiss the notion out-of-hand. As far as your tuning stability argument is concerned, the professional tuner does not emerge until well into the 19th century. Lightly strung, low-tension instruments were tuned by the harpsichordists or pianists themselves, just like any other string instruments, and regular touchups throughout a performance (or while practicing) were the rule. (Think of harpists...) I think the piano makers started "supplying" their factory tuners to well-kniown performers as a promotional technique... But, in any case, the idea that a keyboard instrument is expected to keep its tuning through a long performance would be rather strange to the 18th or 19th-century musician or music lover. If you read the description of some concerts presented at the time they lasted for many hours - and were accompanied by loud conversation, food and drink, applause (or boos) whenever the audience felt like it (between movements, during movements). In fact, extended pieces like symphonies and concertos were not played all at once but were spread out through a concert - there were other pieces (like songs or solo miniatures) performed between the movements. I suspect that the pianos were tuned quite often throughout a performance - whether or not a professional tuner was present. Speaking of limitations imposed by keyboard compass, I can show places where Beethoven changed the melody when he ran out of keys - rather than write in a different key. So that argument holds no water. So whenever discussing music in history, we really need to get rid of our notions based on current practice and expectations... By the way, ET was used in the early Baroque era, for fretted instruments - lutes, viols and such. The iconography of the period shows instruments with parallel frets (which means - equal temperament). It also shows instruments with non-parallel frets (which is an attempt to play these instruments in probably meantone - which would have been hellishly difficult). Vincenzo Galilei - a lutenist and theoretician of the era (and Galileo's father) - explicitly recommends it. In practical terms, what happened was that in orchestral situations - such as the operas of Monteverdi - harpsichords and organs that played with lutes were tuned in ET and those harpsichords and organs that were played with violins and winds were tuned in meantone. In effect the orchesra consisted of two different sections that never played together - and all this si quite well documented. I once participated in such a production of Montecverdi's Orfeo - it was quite interesting... Anyway, the notion that ET was not used because of lack of expertise until sometime in the 18th or 19th century is just not true. It was simply rejected because it did not meet the musical tastes of the time. Musicians concerned with key color and key differences would find it unusable. Musicians looking for the gorgeous triad sonorities of meantone would reject it. (And I have again and again been by the amazed reaction of today's musicians who are struck by the beauty of meantone triads - admittedly, not on the piano - when first exposed to them.) And musicians who sought the affects of key differences in their music would reject ET out of hand. Every tuning system has its limitations. If you want key differences - ET is unusable. If you want to run wildly around the keys without running into "crunchy" sounding chords - well, then WT is limiting. And if you keep looking at music history through 20th-century spectacles - well, you sort of miss the point... And I'll repeat again that, though I might quibble over some of the details, I still find Fred's approach to the issues of temperament the most refreshingly plausible approach that I've encountered in a long time in it's lack of dogmatism - whether of "historical" or "contemporary" nature. Israel Stein > 1. I am less conviced that composers chose particular keys for any color than for the natural chordal progressions they heard in their heads -- which would not have been influenced by key color. They may have avoided certain keys which were affected by dissonance, but that seems more to indicate that the composer was limited by any tuning effect than aided by it. I think to assume that composers "used" colors of the keys is to assume their minds were limited by what they were hearing from the instrument. I think rather that they heard in their heads what they wanted the instrument to be capable of. I realize it is a movie, but near the end of "Amadeus" we get a vision of Mozart hearing every nuance of the Requiem as he dictated to Salieri faster than Salieri could write. That is my vision of music compostion - not something affected by limitations of scale temperament of the instrument. The rare occurrences I have had with musical creativity, I have heard it in my head first. Assuming that composition was so heavily influenced by scale is to both ignore the natural direction of chord progression in music composition and discredits the genius of those who we revere today. > > 2. I think since keychanges for compositions weren't so limited for orchestra, I would think a composer would be more likely to feel entrapped by less equal temperaments if they were indeed the norm. I would find it difficult to believe any composer who had freedom of keys with other composition would prefer the limitations of non-equal tunings (as we interpret historical instructions) for the keyboard. We must also remember that most keyboards were not 88 keys in those days. So the keyboard layout placed other limitations on which keys could be chosen. If I sit down at a piano and try to play something in my head, the farthest thing from my mind is tuning. While I might instinctively react reproachably to an interval grossly affected by an out of tune note, my senses immediately reassure me that the dissonance is due to an erroneous execution of tuning rather than what that interval actually should have sounded like. I don't think the masters were any less perceptive than I am. Far more important is which keys I feel more comfortable playing in, range of the keyboard, and range/playability/singability of any other instrument/singer/ensemble if applicable. Rather than sitting at an 88 note piano, sometime try sitting at a 61 or 76 note keyboard and see if you choose the same keys. When you find yourself wanting to use the transpose function, there is the "aha" moment. > > 3. I agree with the notion that while many different versions of tuning instructions were published, all they could provide was a framework to start with. Just like today, our published tuning instructions stop once we complete the cycle once through, rarely do we end up with the intended result on that single pass. My thinking is that the instructions available only reflected what was known and understood about the mathematical relationships of musical scale, but were not necessarily indicative of what the intended finished scale might sound like. There were indeed, also, published sets of instructions as early as the late 18th and early 19th centuries which produced as good an ET as most any of us can produce on a day to day and piano to piano basis today. My thinking is that, like today, a tuner would take the instructional information available, but then use his own senses to adjust the results to produce a scale that would allow as much versatility as possible. Consider that if one were to give a single set of tuning instructions to 10 different tuners today, you would get 10 audibly different results. I think that it is silly to assume that tuners of the past were capable of more consistent uniformity than we are today. > > 4. Just how stable was a piano tuning during the time we are discussing? Those instruments and the climactic instabilities they would have been exposed to would have had to have been incredibly unstable. I dare say a morning tuning probably wouldn't have been recognizable by noon. Compare to the modern composer, many of whom rarely have their pianos tuned. How can we expect, regardless of where the tuner left the tuning, that when the composer was actually composing that the instrument still reflected the temperament that had been tuned? It is my thinking that tuning stability would have been so fleeting that the actual tuning theories employed by whichever tuner would have been inconsequential. Think practice room pianos. For reasons of instability alone, it is my thinking that placing high importances on tuning theory differences is making a mountain out of a molehill. > > 5. And, related to #4 above, what about the imperfections of scale and their effect on temperament setting? One only needs tune an economy model piano today to find that in the temperament section most commonly used in tuning instructions that the imperfections of the scale just don't allow results intended in the instructions. And once you get outside the middle couple octaves, differences in temperament are completely unnoticeable. > > Something was mentioned about Steinway's ET only protocol. One must take that with a large grain of salt. I have heard Steinway techs say more than once (paraphrased), "We have many tuners. None of them tune the same way and we get no complaints about tuning. Much more important than tuning are regulation and voicing skills." I'm thinking perhaps Chopin's preference of tuner may be similarly related, given that he is probably more known for the technical difficulty of his compositions than harmony. Unless he couldn't find anyone else who could produce a stable tuning that would hold up to his performance abilities, I'm skeptical to believe the actual tuning (temperament) was the basis for his choice. > > My own conclusions are that the Historical Temperament hype is much ado about nothing. Outside of stability, my own thinking is that tuning as a whole is grossly overrated. Even octaves and unisons have a wide range of variation that most all musicians will find acceptable. I've heard many piano performances in which I thought the piano was beautifully tuned, whereupon closer -- MUCH closer -- inspection and dissection I discover the tuning not to be as I thought I'd heard it from a distance and/or in the context of the music. As has been illustrated by many of the contributions on this subject, it is completely impossible to confirm which tuning theories would have been employed, not simply from which time period to time period or composer to composer, but from composition to composition. In my mind that renders the whole pursuit as trivial, particularly if we are employing HTs erroneously. It is also folly to assume that tuning results in actual practice would consistently resemble what we today assume was intended by the tuning instructions they had available, and so it would be completely impossible to achieve what the composer might have been hearing. My own perception is that the historical tuning instructions were the best attempt they could make at instructing how to arrive at as equal results as were consistently achievable. But in order to achieve any level of recognition of the "inventor", they couldn't be exactly like someone else's instructions, thus a plausible explanation for the many different published variations. Just like Coke and Pepsi, if you serve the syrups from a fountain over crushed ice, you just about can't tell the difference - especially if you don't have them side by side. These side by side illustrations of the difference in temperament are interesting novelty -- but that was never the intended point was it? My perception of any musicians preferring any historical temperament over ET or another HT is a result of what I might call "The Emperor's New Clothes" effect. I would further recommend, based on my experience, that if you are tuning for anything involving an ensemble, it is best to pursue ET to avoid making virtuoso musicians sound completely incompetent. Modern musicians are not accustomed to tuning to the various HT deviations and the entire ensemble will sound like a beginning orchestra class. (I suspect that may well have been the case 200 years ago as well). > > The compositions are timeless. The instruments, musicians, and tuning practices are not. No life experience can be exactly repeated. No two performances will be alike. Even recordings do not exactly duplicate what the ear originally heard. The reality that we cannot duplicate what the composer originally heard is the single most important beauty of the composer's original intention. > > My thoughts, > Jeff Tanner >
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