On Mar 7, 2009, at 9:26 AM, Jeff Tanner wrote: > 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. I have a different take. In my ideal world, the caut is not "the authority," but someone with the knowledge and willingness to collaborate. I would certainly never presume to tell the prof or visiting artist what to do. If they know what they want, I provide it. But there are many circumstances where we work together, or ought to. Take deciding what to put on the historic instrument (if there is one or more) used by students to practice. I think the caut should be able to talk to the prof and come up with something reasonable, ideally a series of reasonable tunings, to expose the students to a range of temperaments, and to have the opportunity to teach them where and when they were used, and for what repertory. We are there for the students (we being the institution and its employees). This is in their best interest - how else, how better are they going to learn what different temperaments sound like? Professors in the field are likely to have a certain amount of "book learning" on the subject, but are likely to be somewhat tentative and confused themselves - most won't have good tuning chops, and won't have a great handle on how things really sound or ought to sound. So there is an opportunity to put sound to the theories, and make them real. They are likely to think of us as at least a little authoritative on subjects pertaining to tuning - that's as it should be, don't you think? I agree it is a field where there are so many opinions and such lack of clarity that it is hard to become well grounded. But the basic facts are pretty obvious and apparent, and have been so for centuries. I read Rousseau and Montal, and they are describing my own experience. It boils down to the problem of trying to resolve thirds and fifths within the octave, the insoluble puzzle. Something has to give. There are an infinite number of possible individual solutions/compromises, but really there are only a few patterns that were used historically, along with variants that aren't all that much different from one another, in spite of the extraordinarily heated arguments the subject raises. IOW, it is a subject that doesn't need to be nearly as confusing as it has become. It can be learned fairly readily and easily if presented well. It hasn't been presented well in many cases, hence the confusion. We need to do something about it. 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/20090308/5dd5c2b8/attachment.html>
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