[CAUT] temperament

[Laurence Libin]

Just a small clarification, please: Do you mean that a skillled 18th-century harpsichordist would not have adjusted a temperament to suit the demands of the music being played? 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Fred Sturm 
  To: caut at ptg.org 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 11:35 PM
  Subject: Re: [CAUT] temperament


  On Apr 13, 2010, at 2:46 PM, Laurence Libin wrote:


    his crude instructions make my point; they leave latitude to adjust the temperament within an acceptable range, much as tuners today tweak ET. 


  They "leave latitude" I suppose. More likely, they simply accept a wider degree of tuning variability, as do most practicing musicians of today and of the past. Violinists do not tune their fifths within a tolerance of one cent, for instance, nor do an oboe and a flute trying to create a just major third (in the course of performing a piece) manage to do so within more than perhaps the tolerance of two cents. In my own recreation of that past, I believe that musicians tuning their own keyboard instruments (stringed ones, not organs) were somewhat similarly accepting of a range of error that a modern piano technician would find absurdly broad and unacceptably sloppy.
  In any case, I believe Rameau knew what he meant, whether or not he could achieve it with the accuracy demanded by the 20th and 21st centuries. And I believe we do a disservice to the understanding of history if we project back onto a Rameau or a person following his lead, and try to claim that that person would "artistically alter" the tuning. I think it is far more likely that they would do as I did when I first learned to tune ET, via a circle of fifths, and do the best they could and call it good enough. Maybe a the results would be randomly different patterns, and maybe we would notice the difference between "randomly varied ET like tuning" and "pure ET" in the actual performance of music, or maybe we wouldn't. I don't think it has been proved either way, however much we may theorize. Who has done the rigorous testing? I don't know of any.
  In any case, I brought up Rameau, not to say anything about his advocacy of ET (which had little immediate practical effect, immediate meaning decades in his case), but simply to note his honest observation concerning the dominant tuning of his time and place, French Ordinaire. He found that often intervals sounded quite jarring. His reaction was much the same as I believe would be the reaction of most of us today, including this quote from a couple days ago: 
  "temperaments so extreme that they're initially jarring, but they're fine for music intended for them--but that repertoire is limited and takes getting used to."
  Our ears aren't really different from that of our forebears, or so I have come to believe. 





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  Fred Sturm
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