Greetings all, Some of you by now have seen or read the Stuart Isacoff book "Temperament" . The members of the "Tuning" list have been having a bit of spar over it, and the following post was sent in by J. Reinhard. It is a sentence by sentence of a small portion of the book. The quote is the first line, Johnny's response, marked with the ----, follows each of Isacoff's sentences. Just another look at the topic! Regards, Ed Foote RPT >From the Tuning list: BY JOHNNY REINHARD Isacoff Errors p. 216-217 with the text appearing as in the book, though sentence by sentence: Equal temperament was not, however, the only tuning proposed to accommodate this new musical trend. ----The wrong implication as Werckmeister preceded ET on keyboards Werckmeister developed an irregular temperament that came to be known as well temperament. -----Werckmeister called it, and likely named it well temperament. In Werckmeister's well-tempered tuning, certain keys were more in tune than others, but none were so out of tune as to be unplayable. -----No key were was more dissonant than Pythagorean, which was still heard in the culture. Therefore, as a musical work moved from one key center to another, the shift would become blatant: the more far-reaching the displacement, the more grating the harmonies. -----Not blatant at all, at least most people do not register any difference at all. And there is nothing grating other than a modern predisposition. Isacoff clearly has not heard the tuning. This variegation a kind of perspective through audible shading was seized upon as a good thing by opponents of equal temperament, who saw in Werckmeister's system the advantage of a built-in musical syntax. -----This happens after Werckmeister and after Bach, not during the Baroque. Changes in a piece s scales and harmonies were now overlaid with an added expressive element: a dramatic change in the quality of sound, depending on which tones the music revolved around at a given moment. -----Baroque composers were careful not to overexpose the foreign keys or chords. Here Isacoff is at the tip of the iceberg regarding its potential expressivity. (Of course, this change would only occur on keyboard instruments; strings and woodwinds were left to pursue their own musical grammars.) -----Poppycock. Woodwinds always played, along with the strings of the Baroque, with the ever present keyboard. There is no separate grammar. Advocates claimed for well temperament the bonus of giving each key its own character; but for many, subjecting a keyboard to gradations of in-and out-of-tuneness offered little in the way of musical value. -----This is ignorance of the value of key character. It shows up the value for melody ala the Rousseau bit since the ecstatic free nature of melody is better represented. And more in the way of musical value, not less. Indeed, Werckmeister himself eventually became an advocate for equal temperament. -----This is a lie. Werckmeister supported his chromatic tuning throughout his entire life, as I have previously exposed on this list. The German critic and composer Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg who, at the request of the heirs of Bach, wrote a preface for a new edition of the master's Art of Fugue offered a terse critique of the well-tempered system in 1776: Diversity in the character of the keys, he wrote, will serve only to increase a diversity of bad sounds in the performance. -----Marpurg was the director of the lottery and a bitter man. He is writing against Kirnberger (who was supported by CPE Bach and others). There is controversy to this day over whether Bach preferred equal or well temperament. Some theorists contend that there is internal evidence in his music differences in the way he handled different keys to suggest he had well temperament in mind. -----Yet there is little by Isacoff to represent the other side fairly. (One modern scholar insists that he has broken the code of Bach's secret tuning by unraveling the images in the composer's personal seal, which contained seven points and five dashes. However, his secret solution conflicts with statements about temperament made by musicians in Bach's circle.) -----Rather crude not to mention Herbert's name. Why not indicate what conflicts there were with statements in Bach's circle? There is as much evidence on the other side: Bach's biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel reported, for example, that Bach moved so subtly through the keys that listeners never noticed the change; this suggests equal temperament. -----And yet Forkel is one of the clearest that Bach is not equal temperament. None of this proves that Bach used anything different than Werckmeister. Only Isacoff is suggesting ET. His obituary made a similar comment about the artful way in which he tuned his instruments -----And tuning Werckmeister is MUCH faster than tuning 12-tET
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