Claudio Di Veroli, via Kent Swafford writes:
>>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.<<
Hmm, they weren't predominant in the literature, but there are some
unexplained facts about the practical results, as evidenced by the compostions
for piano that were created. More on that later.
>>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.<<
Widely shared findings, no matter how extensive, do not create a fact.
I submit that it has to be opinion, unless there is someone here that was
there, then. Otherwise, we are left to consider the writings of people who may
have had some other agenda, perhaps wanting to appear cutting edge, or not
appearing old and dated,(as Bach's music was at one time?). There is a far
distance between writing about it and actually doing it. I wonder how many of
those documents are musical scores, since the composers' use of keys indicate a
consistent, widely shared pattern. This pattern has absolutely nothing to do
with equality. More on that later, too.
>>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.<<
I don't know how to read "most musicians." Is this keyboard only? It
must be, since string musicians, even today, saturated with ET, do not use ET
when left to themselves, (at least, that is how it appears to me, sitting in
the audience with my SAT on my lap. I hear, and see, just intervals
everywhere.) When the piano appears, matching pitch occurs in the melodic area, but I
often hear clashing harmony, quickly corrected to be in unison. The better the
musician, the quicker the correction, but it is still prevalent.
>>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.<<
Are we to believe that the tuners in the field, in a particularly
avant-garde break with tradition, instantly embraced this new, more difficult, often
denigrated, style of tuning? If so, we must accept that the normal tuner of
1830 was more willing to change a long, historical, tradition than tuners of
today. How did Steinway's 'Ludwig' get instruction to tune a WT in Romania
in the 1950s? Why was Henry Freeman, in (1970 Monroe, Louisiana, still of the
opinion that the C-E third had to be "good, even if it means that the sharp
keys were a little ragged"? He had learned from older tuners, and it seems that
there was a tradition of something other than exact ET, even then.
>>I cannot certainly be suspected of favoring 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.<<
Evidence is always subject to interpretation. According to Jorgensen,
Murray Barbour said very clearly that a WT piano would sound like an out of
tune piano. However, I have had numerous pianists, of very high caliber, comment
on how in-tune a WT piano sounded. Something isn't adding up here, for me.
>> An interesting writing by a famous Italian physicist complained in 1790
that
Mozart was using the "wrong" ET system. <<
I find it interesting that a physicist would not understand that there
is only one ET. Seems that he would have complained that Mozart was not using
ET. Could it be that in 1790, "ET" was being used to describe something
other than the one and only ET we know today?
After a couple of centuries of restrictive Meantone, something like a
Young could easily have been regarded as "equal." At the time, a healthy man was
expected to live to be perhaps 50 years old, today, we don't consider that
healthy. (OK, that is a stretched analogy, but I use it to illustrate the
malleable nature of nomenclature.)
>>Schubert would in all likelihood use ET as well, also because it was in use
in the ensembles he played
with/conducted.<<
I don't know what kind of "ensembles" are being referred to here, but
if they were string ensembles, I question if they were closer to ET than s
imply avoiding the enharmonic pitfalls of Ab not being G#.
I am not a proponent of WT for Schubert because of research, but
rather, because the response of pianists has overwhelmingly been so positive inre
the sound of non-ET tuning. I find that I have a more responsive clientele when
I tune in something other than ET. Was it so different 200 years ago?
Even in blind tests, technicians themselves, who know better than anyone
else the sound of ET, favor a non-ET tuning. Have we somehow gone full
circle and find ourselves tuning in equal when we really prefer the sound of non?
How did Bill Bremmer's tuning end up the favored temperament when compared to
the ET? (Rhode Island convention? Jon Page was there, maybe he can supply the
dates.)
One of the hardest facts to get around, (and this is not opinion,
but fact), is the proportion in which composers used the various keys. With
some minor idiosyncrasies (such as LVB's favoring Eb), the choice of home keys
mimics the rising tempering of the thirds, with C being far and away the most
used key and F# being far and away the least used. This is fact, not opinion.
For instance: If we add up 337 separate pieces of music composed for keyboard
between 1760 and 1835, we see a pattern in key choice.
These pieces cover a large part of Mozart's compositions, (21 sonatas, 17
variations, 26 solo keyboard pieces), Beethoven (27 sonatas, 199 variations,
32 other assorted keyboard works), Schubert (12 sonatas and 3 waltzes). What
we find used for home keys in the aggregate total, is:
1. C= 122 times,
2. F= 44
3. Bb = 24
4. Eb= 33
5. Ab = 3
6. C# = 1
7. F#= 1
8. B = 0
9. E = 3
10. A= 37
11. D= 50
12. G= 24
The figures are quite close to the graphing of the M3's width. There
is some bias in there because of the 199 Beethoven variations, and Beethoven
really liked Eb, (which I suspect because of its access to harmonic resouces in
both directions).
If we take the Beethoven variations out of the equation, it looks like this;
1. C= 37 times,
2. F= 21
3. Bb = 14
4. Eb= 18
5. Ab = 3
6. C# = 0
7. F#= 0
8. B = 0
9. E = 0
10. A= 12
11. D= 15
12. G= 24
If we look at only Mozart, we see that in 21 sonatas the keys are used
thusly:
1. C= 5 times,
2. F= 5
3. Bb = 4
4. Eb= 1
5. Ab = 0
6. C# = 0
7. F#= 0
8. B = 0
9. E = 0
10. A= 1
11. D= 3
12. G= 2
If Mozart had use of an equally tempered keyboard, what can explain
his avoidance of 5 perfectly usable keys, right across the circle of fifths most
remote from the key of C?
If we look at 12 Schubert sonatas, we see:
1. C= 4
2. F= 0
3. Bb = 2
4. Eb= 1
5. Ab = 0
6. C# = 0
7. F#= 0
8. B = 0
9. E = 0
10. A= 3
11. D= 2
12. G= 0
If Schubert had use of an equally tempered keyboard, what can explain
his avoidance of 5 perfectly usable keys, right across the circle of fifths most
remote from the key of C? He also avoided G and F, but that is within the
idiosyncratic bounds.
Now, if we look at the Young temperament, (which I am using as an idealized
form of WT), we see a remarkable congruence between the width of the M3's and
the proportion of key choice listed above:
1. C= 5 cents
2. F= 8
3. Bb = 10
4. Eb= 14
5. Ab = 18
6. C# = 19
7. F#= 21
8. B = 19
9. E = 18
10. A= 14
11. D= 10
12. G= 8
Not only is the cumulative total of compositions directly correlated to
tempering in a generalized WT, each individual composers' use of the keys
mimics virtually the same progression! Is this coincidence? I don't think so.
There is more, of course. I didn't have the time to run totals on the
minor keys as used by the composers, but from the slight counting I did, it
appears it follows the same linkage to tempering.
It is also interesting that the gradual democratization of key usage
mimics, chronologically, the general acceptance of ET as Jorgensen posits. By the
time we get to Rachmaninoff, there is far less 'shape' to the graph, and once
in the 20th century, no bias towards the keys at all, just what we would
expect to happen if ET finally gained predominence as Jorgensen proposes.
So, I find it implausible that these three composers just happened to
share the same attraction for the various keys, in near identical proportion.
And it makes sense to me that as we progress from 1750 to 1900, we see a
gradual increase of the more remote keys used as home. I believe that the
composer's keyboard compositions were definitely influenced by non equal tempering
through Chopin. They chose those keys for a reason, and I would love to hear
what else it could have been.
Later in the century, Chopin appears. It appears that his use of home
keys is a mirror image of the other composers, lending even more credence that he
was reacting to tempering, just in a diametrically opposed fashion. The
shape of the pattern is still there, just totally reversed. I would love to see a
more exhaustive compilation of compostions on Rollingball.com, but this is a
lot of work.
Food for thought. I tune the temperaments that please my customers the
most. It is the best employment insurance I can find. It has not proven to be
ET for everyone. Is it a stretch to assume the tuner of 1800 was any
different?
Regards,
Ed Foote RPT
http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
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