On Mar 4, 2009, at 8:32 AM, Jeff Tanner wrote: > We already know "a bit about UET and a bit of relevant music > history." But neither we nor anyone else on the planet know enough > about the two to make a claim that we are the experts in putting the > two together. It isn't "a bit" we will be expected to know. If we > bring it up, then we'll be expected to push it farther. The point is > that I can foresee having a very few, if more than one or two > clients - probably composers - who will want you to learn every > doggone temperament in the book and then decide to make up a few of > his own. And it will be up to us to spend hours and hours of time > researching and practicing various temperaments for one person > instead of working on the verticals in the practice rooms or finally > getting that grand restrung that's been sitting in the shop for 6 > months, with 17 more in line after it. Hi Jeff, I think this notion is the result of Mr. Jorgensen's work. His Tuning the Historical Temperaments by Ear is an extraordinarily confusing book, filled with far more temperaments than were really ever actually used, labelled in chapter titles filled with pompous words that have little or no historical meaning. He followed Murray Barbour's book, which was more or less the first fairly complete account of historic temperaments published in the 20th century (around 1950). That book contained a whole lot of material in an attempt to be complete. If you look at the text, it is obvious that some things have importance and others do not. Jorgensen, on the other hand, simply took every single last one of the "recipes" (calculated in cents) in Barbour's book and treated them more or less equally, whether or not they were important, and whether or not some were mere minor variants of others. He also came up with extraordinarily complicated ways of tuning them aurally, far more complex than was done historically, in an attempt to be ultra-precise. As a result, he muddied the waters and made the whole area of historical temperaments seem far more complex and intimidating than it really is. If we are really talking about historical practice, and we set aside the fantasies about 19th century key coloration (that Jorgensen promoted - and which have very scant historical basis), there are some fairly simple outlines that make choosing appropriate temperaments pretty straightforward. There are geographical and temporal areas for mean tone, modified mean tone, and WTs. (Pythagorean, Just, and the like are mostly irrelevant to us, though they have their place in medieval and renaissance music). And really just a couple variants of each is all you need in a practical sense. Now when we come to 20th/21st century creations, that is a different kettle of fish, but there we are usually talking about mathematics and cents offsets, and there are mathematical tools that make it fairly easy to understand the variants, if you go to the trouble to learn. Regards, 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/20090304/7464c0fe/attachment.html>
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