Forwarded from an interested non-subscriber: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Claudio Di Veroli <dvc at braybaroque.ie> Subject: Schubert and Equal Temperament Dear members of CAUT!: Have a few distinguished friends in your list who told me about this thread. Some tuners and writers believe that unequal temperaments were still predominant in the 19th century. There is plenty of evidence: with the only exception of English speaking countries, they weren't. This is not a matter of opinion: it has been thoroughly investigated by the best scholars on temperament (such as Prof. Barbieri), unearthing thousands of documents on the matter which, albeit in scattered books and papers, fully depict the progress of E.T. country by country c.1750-1900. Surely enough, throughout the 19th c. (even outside unequally-tempered English speaking countries) one finds plenty of written proposals for unequal temperaments! However, most of them EITHER include the complaint that most musicians were using ET instead, OR come from places and times where other documents show that ET was prevalent. There is further indirect evidence confirming this. As for the often-repeated story that accurate ET was only possible after White's book of 1917, this is another myth. Beat rates were first published in 1749 in a best-selling English book. Modern research - tuning experiments included - shows how, even without beat rates, the piano-tuning methods for ET had progressed c.1830 to the point where they would not yield an audible difference from today's standards. I cannot certainly be suspected of favouring ET, having been for decades an introducer and staunch supporter of historically-informed performance using unequal temperaments. Yet, I am reluctant to tune unequal whenever evidence shows that the music was in all likelihood written with ET in mind. Such is certainly the case of Vienna from Classical times on: there is ample evidence or an early and fast adoption of ET in German-speaking countries. An interesting writing by a famous Italian physicist complained in 1790 that Mozart was using the "wrong" ET system. Schubert would in all likelihood use ET as well, also because it was in use in the ensembles he played with/conducted. A recent work of mine (see link below), though devoted to unequal systems, includes several pages on both the history of the diffusion of ET in Europe and the progressive precision reached in the tuning methods for ET. Kind regards Claudio Claudio Di Veroli PhD Bray, Ireland http://harps.braybaroque.ie/ http://temper.braybaroque.ie/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090123/a178d3e3/attachment.html>
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