[CAUT] temperament

[Dennis Johnson]

I'll reread this all again later when I have time, but I have always held
the position regarding Rameau that his comments from 1737 are not relevant
to the volumes of music written long before.  Interesting, but not
relevant.

dennis.
______

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Fred Sturm <fssturm at unm.edu> wrote:

>
> On Apr 13, 2010, at 11:22 AM, Laurence Libin wrote:
>
> Fred, Rameau's remarks from 1737 might or might not indicate equal
> temperament as we understand it (he might have had in mind a circulating
> temperament that approximates equal),
>
>
> Here I am going to disagree. Rameau is very clear in laying out his
> arguments for ET, calling it the natural tuning for the rational system of
> harmony he was espousing. The fifth being more basic than the third, it
> should be as pure as possible. His practical instructions are crude: a
> circle of fifths upward from C, each "un petit peu" (a very little bit)
> narrow, with the proof being FC at the end also being a little narrow. But
> there is no evidence that I know of to suggest any other alternate
> circulating temperament (for Rameau and for France of that period) than a
> flavor of modified mean tone we know today as French Ordinaire.
>
> but a character piece like *L'Enharmonique* from the ca. 1728 *Nouvelles
> suites* kind of misses its point in ET. The chords under the fermata in
> bar 12 of the reprise, in the midst of the descending bass line
> g-f-e-d-c#-b-b flat-a flat-g, are all about cringe, it seems to me.
>
>
> No argument there. Rameau changed his mind. He wrote quite eloquently in
> the 1720s about unequal temperament, and its expressive qualities. Rousseau
> later threw those writings back in his face, saying Rameau got it right the
> first time, and his ET proposal lost all that expressiveness inherent in
> UET.
> But the point I was trying to make is that what is expressive in one
> context can be painfully "out of tune" in another. To take a more modern
> example, jazz musicians often bend pitch in a "blue note." Suppose we tune
> that note on a piano to a "blue" pitch, say B flat in the key of C. Nice and
> expressive in that context. Now we want to play in the key of B flat. All of
> a sudden, what was expressive has become unbearable.
> It's just the centuries old conundrum of fixed pitch. What is given in one
> place is taken away in another. For a style of music which is written with a
> tuning pattern in mind, well and good. When we try to impose that tuning
> pattern on another body of music, it may be very inappropriate. Some of the
> 20th/21st century experimentation with UETs has been aimed seemingly at a
> compromise that will cover all bases. My question (which I doubt can be
> answered definitively) concerns where the boundary lies between enhancement
> and detriment, between significant and insignificant.
> When we arrive at something like the Di Veroli "almost-equal" pattern, with
> offsets from ET of 0.27, 0.54, 0.81, 1.08 plus and minus, we are probably in
> the realm where belief trumps ears, in my practical opinion (I like it fine
> as a theoretical model). Partly, this opinion is based on the inevitable
> accumulation of error in actually tuning instruments. It is rare to tune
> with more refinement than unisons within a range of 0.5 cents, let alone the
> precision with which the pitch of any given note is placed. Fine differences
> disappear in the chatter of random error. But perhaps there are people with
> more acute hearing than I have (and with better tuning chops, capable of
> achieving these niceties with precision), who can tell the difference
> between that pattern and ET, without carefully listening to beat rates of
> thirds in isolation.
> Regards,
> Fred Sturm
> University of New Mexico
> fssturm at unm.edu
>
>
>
>
>
>
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