[CAUT] temperament

[Dennis Johnson]

I think Fred's "practical" answer is to some degree also confirmed by our
own practical experiences.  I agree.  Of course we hate to generalize, but
as interesting as the notion sounds I really don't think musicians who tuned
pulled from a library of options as one might get the impression just from
considering the variety of temperaments published today.  In my own
experience, generally, I have evolved over years a particular style that I
use a majority of the time for most things.   Just how it is, and it works
nicely for me.  Having said that, one good exception is my clavichord which
I always leave in 1/4 c meantone.

Generally, this approach is also consistent with the impression Owen used to
give about historical tuning realities.  Let me say that if musicians really
did modify their tunings on a regular basis for particular music, then
wouldn't we see much less consistent compositional styles for handling
various keys?  Just a question, but who knows anyway.


Dennis Johnson

_____________




On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Fred Sturm <fssturm at unm.edu> wrote:

> On Apr 14, 2010, at 6:59 AM, Laurence Libin wrote:
>
> 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?
>
>
> I don't know the answer to that question. I don't assume that that a
> skilled 18th century harpsichordist would have tuned in more than one way. I
> think, from a practical point of view, and based on what I have read, that
> it is likely a harpsichordist would have learned a method of tuning, and
> would have simply followed it.
> It is, of course, possible to speculate as to what "someone might have
> done," but I haven't seen the documentary evidence that this happened (and I
> have looked at a lot of documentary evidence). I look at the tuning
> instructions Rameau published in 1726 (his description of Ordinaire), the
> instructions Werckmeister published in 1698, and lots of similar documents,
> and assume that they are representative of attitudes and practices. And what
> I see is possible variance of contour within patterns, but nothing to
> suggest that one would alter a tuning to suit a particular piece, or a set
> of pieces in a particular key, or anything of that nature. The variances
> have to do with whether one favors the diatonic keys more, or favors them
> less, with the obvious resultant effect on the more chromatic keys. I see a
> lot of acceptance of fairly random variability in the imprecision of the
> instructions. There is no hint that one should "do this in order to achieve
> this effect, for this situation."
> I guess I should amend that to note that Rameau does suggest that starting
> his instructions for Ordinaire on C with seven ascending 1/4 comma fifths
> would lead to flat keys sounding rather bad, and that he says one should
> perhaps start on B flat in that case (1/4 comma fifths from Bflat to B
> rather than C to C#), which is a shift of the pattern to favor flat keys as
> opposed to sharp keys. But this is a pretty extreme pattern, barely
> tolerably circular. (Other, later Ordinaire instructions (d'Alembert and
> Rousseau in particular) have only four or five 1/4 comma fifths, so it
> becomes somewhat more circular. And one can speculate, as Lindley does, that
> some French tuners of the time shaded their 1/4 comma fifths a bit wider.)
>
> Regards,
> Fred Sturm
> fssturm at unm.edu
> http://www.createculture.org/profile/FredSturm
>
>
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