Inre Montal, (temperament stuff,again)

[A440A@aol.com]

Ric writes:

<< I would be interesting where you got your memory from.  It would

be interesting to hear what Minkoff  the publishers of the 1976

reprint (of Montal) have to say.<< 

     I think I remember Bill Garlick saying that this was newly discovered 
information, in 1976,(the year I graduated from North Bennett).  
 

>>It is dedicated to Pleyel.  Could Montal have done that without

Pleyel's permission?. << 

   Certainly, you don't need permission to dedicate anything.  Montal may 
have been looking for name recognition, too....

>>He claims to have tuned for major venues

and "professors" and performers. Could one of them  have been Chopin?<< 

    Well, without documentation, we must accept that he may have been blowing 
smoke.  I know of one tuner today that claims he has tuned for a huge list of 
artists, though it happened that it was a singular event that they tuned for 
and one of these happened to have been on the bill. Two of the larger names 
he uses didn't recognize his name when I asked them about it. What Claude 
claims doesn't mean anything without more corroboration. 

 >>We know Chopin had to have encountered piano tuners.  If tuning

was so important I can't believe Chopin had nothing to say about

tuners, or the "method"  of tuning.  Maybe he did but  biographers

thought it uninteresting to the average reader. <<

   Chopin is on record as being distressed that his "favorite tuner" had 
committed suicide,(off a bridge).  He was particularly attached to this man's 
tuning, saying, (I think), no one else could tune like him.  Which suggests 
that either this tuner had a particular way of temperament, or was one of the 
few people  tuning a true ET. Either way, this anecdote seems to indicate 
that ET wasn't a widespread phenomenon at the time. 
(If the majority of tuners had learned to produce an ET, why would one of 
them stand out so much to Chopin?) 
 

>>You may be correct to say it (Montal's book) languished in

obscurity as far as English speaking are concerned, but what about

the French?.  Did it ever go through reprints? <<
     
      I said nothing about "as far as English speaking" , and if it was 
reprinted, it still sank into obscurity for for over a century.  Hardly a 
sign of it being widely influential. 


>

>    Tuners simply don't change their tuning philosophy(much less

their work

> habits) very fast.   


>>You have a good imagination but how is this related to how tuners

of 1830 actually tuned?<<

There were no schools, no mass communication, etc.  The reliance on existing 
techniques would have to be greater then than today, and the learning of the 
trades was much less universal.  Any way of making money was guarded, (the 
guilds of the 17th-19th century were very protective of their arts)

>>How do you know that the tuner of 1830

practiced the arcane art of harmonic decisions whatever that is?

The subject of temperament is arcane today, do you think it was less so in 
1800?  Without a system of measurement, the tuning was done by aesthetic 
decisions, not science, (according to Barbour and Jorgensen).
 

 >> The 'hand-me-down'

nature of instruction by >individuals  doesn't lend itself to

rapid changes and adoption of avante->garde ideas.


>And what  was this "rank and file tuning according to hand me

down instruction"?   Meantone?

   From many indications, yes.  Hipkins says that one of James Broadwood's 
favorite tuners used meantone, so we might consider that the wolves were 
still prowling in the 1800's.  This would make a well-temperament easy to 
regard as equal. Which would answer a lot of the questions posed. 

>>Wow,  Why do you think modern tuners who were trained by hand

me down instruction are hard to persuade that what they learned,

ET, should suddenly be substituted for some arcane tuning scheme

from the past which no one really knows was even widely tuned then

and which for some reason has not been handed down.........now

should suddenly be tuned? << 

    I haven't found that modern tuners are hard to persuade, if they have the 
chance to hear a side by side comparison.  Many have told me that they are 
now pursuing a multi-temperament course because they got an understanding of 
the choices at the conventions.  

>>Consider how it is proposed to be

tuned-------by machine.   I think you are 300 years too soon.  The

aural tradition will not die out that fast.<< 

    The aural tradition has taken the biggest hit in the history of tuning 
during the last 12 years, and it is solely due to the programmable tuning 
machine.  In formal comparisons, the best of the best, (Coleman and Smith) 
have demonstrated that tuners cannot reliably tell the difference between the 
two. 

>>In the fervor to explore "historical tunings" a significant

aspect has been forgotten about the nature of piano tuning.  And

that is aural tuners were taught the system and methods of their

teachers who were taught by their teachers who were taught their

teachers and so on back into time.  ET is  a historical tuning.

It was the main one.  <<

   It has been the only one for the last 100 years, but that is the point of 
this whole discussion, there is a lot of piano music written before ET had it 
influence.   
 


>  It seems that if Montal's procedures had been taken up by

the tuners of  the era, we would have heard him hailed as the hero

of the musical world,for finally solving the puzzle.


>>What puzzle?    Mersenne published the answer to that in 16 something.

The puzzle was "HOW" to do it.  Mersenne only published the math, not the 
procedure, but he also said that it wouldn't be possible to achieve this by 
ear.  Newton published a theory of thermodynamics, but that doesn't mean he 
invented the ICBM.  
 

>Wouldn't his name would have entered the

> literature of the musical trade as surely as Columbus's did in history.


>>Really.  who was Columbus's navigator?  

Americus Vespucci.  Our country is named for him. 
  

 Ed Foote RPT 
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html