On Apr 20, 2010, at 8:32 AM, Laurence Libin wrote: > I didn't know England still had split key square pianos in the first > half of the 19th century; were they produced commercially or only > for demonstration? Does one survive? > I'm aware only of Zumpe's from 1766 or thereabouts. Sorry, writing too hastily and not paying enough attention to details. You are right, it is the Zumpe piano that had split keys, and this was mid/late 18th, not early 19th century. During the same period, mid- late 18th century, split keyboard harpsichords and organs were also built and used, again in England. This practice had essentially died out on the continent, and its adoption in England is further evidence of the prevalence of mean tone at the time. The extended mean tone grand piano design, though, with pedals to shift the range, dates from early 1800s. Probably not actually built, but its patent indicates the attitude of the time. Organs of this sort were, in fact, built and used in the 1800s. > Incidentally It appears that David Tannenberg, following Sorge, > introduced ET to America in the 1760s, but his 1761 clavichord was > apparently scaled differently. Anyway, is it safe to assume that > when Mozart and Haydn and Mendelssohn played in London, their pianos > were not in ET? That is an open question. It is possible in Haydn's case that he and/ or musicians from Germany with him tuned their own instruments, but that is speculation. In the case of Mozart (as a child), unless Leopold tuned it, it is likely that it was not in ET nor in a circulating temperament. But I don't think there is any documentary evidence to help us here. We can merely speculate. > And that Continental piano music distributed in Britain before, say, > 1830, was normally played there in temperaments other than what the > composers anticipated? Probably true, especially people buying their music and performing in their own homes. Contemporary accounts suggest that the tuning "deteriorated badly" when approaching the wolf areas, so it seems clear that much tuning was either in the realm of MT or modified MT (Ordinaire), NOT a milder WT nor ET. > If so, what did Clementi, Dussek, Moscheles, John Field and the > rest of the prolific London piano school think about this, if > anything? Regardless of composers' preferences (I doubt most cared), > it would seem that a lot of piano music played in Britain before > about 1840 wasn't heard in ET. Yes, that last sentence is undoubtedly true. Clementi is on record stating that tuning should be such that all keys are equally usable. One must assume that the history is not as cut and dried as I described it, that there was overlap of one sort and another, that individual people with individual skills and predilections moved from country to country. There were probably at least a few tuners capable of either a reasonable ET or a reasonable WT in London during this time. And the traveling virtuosi would probably have used them - speculation, but reasonable speculation. It seems unlikely they would have accepted playing on MT or extreme Ordinaire. > And I'd bet, though it can't be proven or disproven, that the same > was true on the Continent, no matter what tuning instructors and > theorists advised. Except that the documentary evidence for the continent, especially Germany/Austria, is diametrically different from that of England. No doubt there were traditions that persisted, but we must note where those traditions were rooted. In Germany, they were thoroughly rooted in a century of circular temperaments, and knowledge about how to achieve a fairly refined ET was readily available. For instance, from the early 1700s, first Neidhardt, then Sorge and Marpurg all wrote of first dividing the octave into contiguous thirds, then dividing each of these thirds into component fifths. This reduces the string of fifths to four, vastly reducing the imprecision. And this method did enter the "Tuning Manual" literature. German writings about how tuning sounded do not include such accounts of deterioration of tuning in the outer keys as they do in England. But you are certainly welcome to make your bet, and nobody is going to be able to collect <G>. My problem is when people state such an opinion as "fact." We are better served by examining and stating the evidence. It is not absolute, but it is certainly suggestive of trends. > As for Steinway, it would be fun to test the temperament of the > extant Steinway reed organ for whatever light it might shine on the > question. > Laurence Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu http://www.createculture.org/profile/FredSturm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100420/afddf862/attachment.htm>
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