While I'll offer historical temperaments to anyone who asks I don't try to pretend to be an authority. I'll ask what temperament they want, and converse with them about the music to be presented, but if this person is a performer with enough knowledge to request an UET, then in our conversation they are the expert and I am the not-totally-ignorant executor of their wish. While I don't have to be an expert on music history (which clearly I am not) I don't have to play stupid either. I don't see where the "trap" comes in and where we are going to doom our successors. dp David M. Porritt, RPT dporritt at smu.edu<mailto:dporritt at smu.edu> From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Tanner Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 10:27 AM To: caut at ptg.org Subject: Re: [CAUT] professor tuning variables ----- Original Message ----- From: Fred Sturm 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<mailto:fssturm at unm.edu> Hi Fred, Regardless that Mr. Jorgensen may have gone a bit far, the academic community has a copy of "Big Red". But that was the only HT resource I noticed in our music library. I also saw copies of it in several faculty offices. In that, it appears to them to be authoritative. If we speak up and say, "but...it really isn't that way," who are they going to believe? You are in fact making my point - describing just how massive, confusing and controversial this subject is: The difficulty of actually locating credible sources, deciphering which are and are not -- and not to mention the time involved in all that research, and all that for what percentage of our clientele? How many years of HT study has it taken for you to come to the place where you are now? How often are we called upon to employ this lifetime of research? Unless tuners are the ones promoting the cause, perhaps....never? Just so you know, we're closer to agreement than you realize. You've in fact made statements in earlier threads which echo my main sentiment. I cannot easily locate now the one statement you made that is my favorite wording, but these from other posts are along the same thinking: "If we are posing as experts on historical tuning, we need to have a solid basis for our opinions, and know where they fit in the spectrum of current scholarly thought. Unfortunately, it is difficult to come by this knowledge." - Fred Sturm "I hope I don't need to add that I make no argument against those who prefer something besides ET, and who offer it to their clients as an alternative. (Nor am I personally an advocate for or against ET, except for purely practical reasons). That is an entirely different question. It is when we get into the business of making claims about history that I raise objections." - Fred Sturm Some have suggested that to choose to not learn a bit about unequal temperaments and their proper application is to unprofessional (my wording). My thinking is the opposite: that to position oneself as an authority with only a bit of knowledge is quite unprofessional. It seems to me that having only a bit of knowledge on the subject we're discussing is akin to knowing how to take off in an airplane, but not how to navigate airspace or to land it and convincing passengers to get on an airplane with you. Jeff -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090307/671ea657/attachment-0001.html>
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