Susan writes:
>I started as a string player, made my living at it for
>awhile. My intonation was good, and of course I had
>worked hard on it for years and years.
>Now, cello intonation is melodic, not harmonic, and when
>I first was studying tuning I couldn't even hear the beats
>in a third (for a day or so ...) I just heard that it was
>in tune. Nonetheless, when I first heard historical
>temperaments (years later), I discovered that during
>the cello-studying years I had developed
>a very strong taste for what size intervals should be.
Greetings,
If I read this correctly, Susan, you are saying that intervals *should*
be a particular size? Do you mean to say there is only one size for a third?
When you double stopped, did you not aim for Just? Or, does this mean that
when you were playing a third, you played it 14 cents wide? I have never
heard a cello, in ensemble, play that highly tempered a third unless it was
really leading into some resolution. Otherwise, it sounds horribly out with
the rest of the group.
>I can understand that people who have not developed their
>sense of interval size or intonation as keenly (especially
>the general public) could get a great deal from non-equal
>temperaments.
We have a mirror image of the perspective here. I feel like my sense of
interval size was null and moot for all the years that I meticulously(and
somwhat obsessively) made them all alike, and it wasn't until I began
appreciating the beauty of a more consonant sensation(often juxtaposed with
the expressive texture of more highly tempered intervals) that I began to
think that size mattered!
I haven't yet heard a string player that can play in ET when
unaccompanied, and in a string ensemble, playing in ET would be a disaster.
I have also been told by members of a string quartet that everything changes
when they move to a quintet with piano.
Regards,
Ed Foote (who likes to fret with my strings)
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