[CAUT] Goldberg Variations report

[Donald McKechnie]

Oh, I don't know Fred, I kind of liked the idea of Tuner's  
Discretion. :-) Unfortunately it did not work out to my taste. It  
would have been nice to try different temperaments and at least listen  
to some selected variations to determine the best. I was going from  
what the players were telling me. Even they had differing opinions. It  
is just so subjective at times! When I get the chance, I will give  
Poletti's Werckmeister instructions a look and give it a try. When  
they do the Big Bach Bash again next year I hope to spend more time  
trying different temperaments.

Thanks!
Don

Donald McKechnie
Piano Technician
Ithaca College
dmckech at ithaca.edu
607.274.3908

> From: Fred Sturm <fssturm at unm.edu>
> Date: October 7, 2009 11:06:18 AM EDT
> To: caut at ptg.org
> Subject: Re: [CAUT] Goldberg Variations report
> Reply-To: caut at ptg.org
>
>
> On Oct 5, 2009, at 10:33 AM, Donald McKechnie wrote:
>
>> I started out with Valotti/Young since it is nicely centered on G.  
>> I also tried Kirnberger and Werckmeister. All of these three worked  
>> well for the most part but there were certain passages in a number  
>> of the variations where things got too spicy. I tried a few others  
>> from rollingball.com but the results were similar.
>>
>> I was not getting anywhere with the temperaments so I decided to  
>> practice that old tradition of Tuner's Discretion. Since Valotti/ 
>> Young is centered on G I tweaked a few of the accidentals thus  
>> slowing down some of the thirds. I put this tuning on the  
>> instruments for the dress rehearsal. They said this worked well. I  
>> was not at the dress so this modified temperament is what I used  
>> for the recital.
>>
>> What I heard in the recital is a bit different from the report I  
>> got after the dress rehearsal. I found the modified Valotti/Young a  
>> bit too spicy for my taste in certain passages. For the most part  
>> the faster variations sounded pretty good but there were times in  
>> most of the slow variations where it did not work for me. The one  
>> exception was the slow variation #25. It really worked on this  
>> piece. Quite surprising!
>
>
> 	Very interesting account. The back and forth between not spicy  
> enough and too spicy is quite revealing. Lehman is not spicy enough,  
> but Vallotti is too spicy. They are really quite close, and I'd say  
> Lehman would be about the best choice for someone who wanted a  
> temperament like Vallotti but a bit milder. Essentially, Vallotti is  
> a string of six 1/6 comma 5ths (about twice as narrow as ET, 3.6  
> cents narrow) together with a string of six just 5ths. Lehman  
> basically just takes one of those 1/6 comma 5ths and divides its  
> narrowness between two 5ths (two 1/12 comma 5ths, about ET size, 1.8  
> cents narrow). The details (if you include the "schisma" 5th, which  
> is 2 cents narrow), makes it just a little bit milder still, but the  
> difference is quite subtle. The widest 3rds become slightly smaller  
> than Pythagorean, while Vallotti does have three Pythagorean thirds  
> (two i you account for the schisma 5th, which Vallotti did - I don't  
> remember just now what Young did, whether he was using syntonic or  
> Pytahgorean comma 5ths).
> 	 With Kirnberger III and Werckmeister, you have the same  
> Pythagorean thirds as Vallotti (more of them in Kirnberger), but the  
> narrow 5ths can sound pretty objectionable to someone unaccustomed  
> to mean tone.
>  	Tweaking a few accidentals is a tricky business, as any individual  
> change has more than one additional consequence (there is an equal  
> and opposite one, but others as well). If you move an accidental in  
> Vallotti, you are narrowing one pure 5th, but widening another, so  
> you are adding to the total "out of tuneness" of the thirds, taken  
> as a whole. Really, I think you have to have a total structure in  
> mind and follow a pattern (meaning, practically speaking, a chain of  
> 5ths), or you are almost bound to run into trouble. If you want to  
> emulate what tuners did then, I think that the Werckmeister  
> practical instructions I posted a link to earlier is a good starting  
> point. http://www.polettipiano.com/Pages/pag1engpaul.html
>
> Regards,
> Fred Sturm
> University of New Mexico
> fssturm at unm.edu



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091007/8f4a86a2/attachment.htm>