I checked the header of this post I got from Kent, forwarding this message from Claudio di Veroli, and it seemed to have come only to me. As it was obviously intended for the list, I am forwarding it on. Some of my comments in a couple previous posts were made on the assumption that everyone had received this. And maybe you had, in which case please excuse the redundancy. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu Begin forwarded message: > ---------- 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/20090124/95452918/attachment.html>
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