On Mar 5, 2009, at 6:35 PM, Jeff Tanner wrote: > Hi Jeff, > I think this notion is the result of Mr. Jorgensen's work.... > Hey Fred, > No. It is actually the result of reading your recent posts on the > subject, Hmm, I suppose a lot of what I have written _has_ been confusing, partly because I have been feeling my way as to how to approach this whole subject, partly because what I have been writing is so contrary to the "accepted wisdom" in the piano tuning community. I came at historical tuning before Jorgensen was part of that scene, in 1972 when I bought a clavichord and needed to tune it. I learned from various sources, largely from articles by Mark Lindley, who continues to be one of the most reliable and authoritative sources on historical tuning writing in English. Murray Barbour's book was the most comprehensive source, a reasonably complete survey of historical sources (at the time - more has been unearthed since). Problem was, it gave data in cents. There were no practical tuning instructions, so it was interesting but at the same time not helpful, frustrating. Here is where Jorgensen entered the picture. He translated Barbour's cents into aural tuning instructions. And, BTW, this was a monumental task at that time, involving logarithms to several decimal places, and all sorts of complex formulae for converting between cents and hertz, before there were such conveniences as pocket calculators, let alone spreadsheets. So Jorgensen provided a great service, or at least so it seemed. I glanced at his "Tuning the Historical Temperaments by Ear" when it came out (1977), found it to be written in a very annoying and overly complicated way, but figured that it was probably a good thing to have available as a resource (even if I never used it myself). I have looked at it more carefully in the past few weeks, and my opinion has changed dramatically. A case in point is the 1/7 comma mean tone we have discussed recently. The source (Jorgensen's source) for that is Barbour. It occurs at the end of Barbour's section on mean tone. Here is a quote from Barbour: "Romieu mentioned temperaments of 1/7, 1/8, 1/9, and 1/10 commas, but did not consider them sufficiently important to discuss." Romieu was a French music scholar, who is known primarily based on one article he wrote in 1758, "Mémoire théorique et pratique sur les systèmes temperés de musique". It is a basic (though not terribly important) scholarly source on temperament history, and covers a wide range of tuning systems, in a "scholarly complete" way. You might think that, based on Barbour's assessment, these four temperaments would be ignored and omitted. But, no, Jorgensen not only calculated aural procedures for each, he gave them pompous and impressive sounding titles: "Tuning the Theoretically Correct Jean Baptiste Romieu 1/7 Syntonic Meantone Temperament in the Acoustic Tonality of C Major and A Minor." There is no mention of who this Romieu was, there is no mention of the fact that Romieu thought these were not important enough to discuss. These appear on equal footing with all the other temperaments in Jorgensen's book. Not content with this, Jorgensen went further. He created, out of whole cloth (entirely his own invention), a well temperament based on each of these mean tone temperaments. Each has its own chapter with the same sort of title, and there is not one iota of mention that these are Jorgensen's inventions. So, out of an obscure reference to four tuning systems that were not considered important in their time, Jorgensen produced eight temperaments that he gave equal status to all the others in his book. And this is his standard procedure throughout his book. Whereas there are actually only three mean tone temperaments that had any practical historical importance (and a couple others that lead into some interesting microtonal areas), Jorgensen overwhelms us with nearly 50 recipes for mean tone variants. In sum, I am absolutely appalled at what I find, and I can see that the task of trying to create some clarity from this morass is a monumental one. This is without mentioning the "Big Red," which is, if anything, worse. Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090306/b52aef79/attachment.html>
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