[CAUT] temperament for Schubert (Fred Sturm)

[Fred Sturm]

On Jan 14, 2009, at 12:50 PM, A440A at aol.com wrote:

>        I don't know about the "aesthetic consideration when  
> composing", but
> Rita Steblin certainly documented a lot of seemingly similar  
> opinions on the
> emotional character found in the various keys.  Though not all  
> identical, most
> of the quoted authors held not dissimilar views on the extreme keys,  
> whether
> on the consonant side or dissonant.

	I am aware of this kind of thing. It is interesting and suggestive,  
but subject to several alternative interpretations. I would point out,  
for instance, that not all music is written for fixed pitch  
instruments, like the piano. Music for orchestra and other instruments  
is certainly a larger portion of the literature, and similar opinions  
about key character apply to that music. Much of the compositional  
choice of key has to do with range, tessitura, how it works with the  
given instrument. Violins in particular center around the key of D.  
"Strange" keys will sound strange due to unfamiliarity of musicians  
with fingering and finger placements to achieve the appropriate  
accidentals - and with early woodwinds and brass, the impossibility of  
altering pitch enough with the embouchure to get to the desired pitch.
	In historical terms, temperament tuning developed from mean tone to  
circulating. Mean tone has exactly equal M3s, eight of them, and four  
diminished fourths ("unusable" M3s). In the evolution towards  
circulating temperaments, the practical instructions (as opposed to  
theoreticians' schemes without a practical way to accomplish them)  
tended to say "Make the 5ths as narrow as the ear can bear, and the  
M3s as wide as the ear can bear." Since the early "bearing plans" went  
as far as creating eight M3s (Peter Prelleur, for instance), we can  
suppose that the result would have the remaining four M3s quite wide,  
perhaps wider than Pythagorean. But in no instance were there  
instructions for grading the sizes of the M3s (in surviving "practical  
instructions"). So that, from a practical historical perspective,  
there would not be an even gradient of sizes of M3, but rather a  
number of "equally good" and a few "equally bad" ones.
	The theoreticians were all over the place. Neidhardt is an extreme  
example - he came up with 21 flavors, the early Baskin-Robbins of  
keyboard tuning. Granted, there was a general tendency for the keys  
with less accidentals to have narrower M3s, but by no means evenly and  
symmetrically.
	While the neat symmetry of Valotti and Young is lovely and  
intellectually satisfying, they do not provide a good model of  
historical practice, as they are exceptions appearing on the fringes.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu