[CAUT] Goldberg Variations report

[Fred Sturm]

On Oct 7, 2009, at 9:43 AM, Donald McKechnie wrote:

> 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.

	Really, come to think about it (second thoughts, that is), if you  
start with a reasonably good foundation, a bit of tweaking of  
individual notes is pretty harmless. Yes, you will increase the total  
"error of the 5ths" by a little (beyond the Pythagorean comma as a  
total for all twelve of them). Because if you move a sharp in  
Vallotti, you will have created a wide 5th, so you will have added  
that much to the accumulated tempering of 5ths. But that isn't very  
significant, really, since 5ths aren't all that critical to the sound  
of a temperament (within reasonable boundaries). In fact, as  
Werckmeister's instructions show, he had no problem with a wide 5th or  
even two or three, as long as they weren't wide enough to be wolves.  
And that is true in general of instructions for modified mean tone,  
which is the tradition those instructions come from.
	The wonderful thing about those Werckmeister tuning instructions is  
the way they show so clearly that people of that time were precisely  
the same as today, and faced the same experiences. Werckmeister is  
very matter of fact, and describes tuning a string of 5ths and  
listening to the M3s as they appear, listening to beats,  just exactly  
as we might describe it - except without that extreme precision that  
is really a late 20th century phenomenon. Good enough is good enough,  
and you go a head and complete the tuning.
	I think reading that particular Werkmeister is a good antidote to  
most modern material about historical temperaments. And it is by no  
means a unique document. There are others along the same basic lines.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu