more on this temperament thing

[Billbrpt@AOL.COM]

---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment
In a message dated 10/29/01 3:30:30 AM Central Standard Time, 
remoody@midstatesd.net (Richard Moody) writes:


> Maybe, (but I doubt it), for keyboard compositions, but for the orchestras
> they
> didn't then nor do they now compose according to temperament.   Temperament
> is a only a concern of the keyboard. (Say did Partch compose piano pieces?
> If not what does Young have to do with his music?)
>      Keyboard music is only one part of Western music.  The rest of Western
> music could care less how the piano is tuned.  The concern of orchestras
> and choruses is intonation.  Beethoven and Strivinsky heard the music in
> their heads and wrote it out on music staves.  The piano needs to be
> tempered to play this music, and the orchestra needs good intonation to
> sound the way the composer intended.  Could Beethoven or STravinsky
> composed if they had no piano?   They say Beethoven wrote music while on
> walks in the woods.  It is hard to imagine that temperament had anything to
> .

The keyboard was and still is the foundation for composition.  People may 
have conceived music in their minds and written it down without the use of a 
keyboard but not without the keyboard having first provided a sense of the 
*affectations* or Key Color.  Why did Beethoven write the 9th symphony in G?  
Why not F#?  why not G#?  Why did modern composers who write pieces in 
multiple keys signatures modulate if there was no reason to do so?  Why do 
their elaborately adventurous pieces often end on the "home" key of C quietly 
and gently or boldly but free of intense vibrato?  Couldn't they end in B or 
C# if the key signature indicates *nothing* whatsoever as to color?

If pianos were really tuned in ET during the 20th Century (I believe they 
rarely were), then what caused composers or songwriters to choose the 
different keys?  It would seem to me that in the eternal and unwavering 
presence of ET, these composers must have had to struggle to *imagine* what 
the music should sound like knowing that what the piano tuned in ET wasn't a 
true representation of the mood of the music.

I don't believe any such imagination took place because the pianos weren't 
really tuned in ET.  Far more likely is the Temperament Sequences (also 
called Bearing Plans) used influenced and affected the results of temperament 
even though the people doing the tuning never realized that.  As far as they 
were concerned, it was ET or simply the way to tune a piano, not even being 
necessary to give the method a definition.  Composers probably didn't think 
in terms of ET or non-ET either, only the thoroughly implanted concepts of 
Key Color.  Today, composers who use a piano tuned in true ET or electronic 
keyboards in ET really do have to *imagine* the key color which should be 
present but are not.

Bill Bremmer RPT
Madison, Wisconsin

---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/60/d8/70/90/attachment.htm

---------------------- multipart/alternative attachment--