Temperament selection

[JAMES]

Ed:  A fascinating piece..... Jim Dally
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <A440A at aol.com>
To: <pianotech at ptg.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 7:03 PM
Subject: Re: Temperament selection


>
> Greetings,
> I wrote:
>>the question is how much tempering can a third take
>>before it becomes a liability rather than an asset.  Few musicians or
>>listeners register a faster third as "out of tune" until it exceeds some
> limit.  That
>>limit is, in some degree, dependant on the listener's expectation.
>
> David writes:
> << The only problem with that argument is that on one hand you are arguing
> that
> a WT piano will seem to have greater sonority than an ET one which I would
> attribute to the impact of the keys in which the 3rds are more pure.  Then
> you are arguing that listeners will not register a faster third as "out of
> tune" until it reaches a certain limit.  While I agree that there is a
> window, you can't have it both ways. <<
>
>       I am a little hazy on why My post was seen as an argument.  I posed 
> an
> observation on one of the factors that affects people's response to non-ET
> tuning and  I do not make any mention of sonority.  I consider the primary
> temperament characteristics to be ones of consonance but I don't consider
> consonance and sonority to be the same thing.
>        Even consonance bears some discussion, since it may be judged by 
> very
> widely disparate scales, (to pun).  A just third is certainly consonant, 
> but
> in a 12 note octave, payment for that justness is made in bigger thirds
> elsewhere.  Some people consider only this perfection to be "consonant" 
> and
> everything else is simply a matter of dissonance.  Others consider 
> consonance to be a
> variable quality, only becoming dissonant at some personal level.  I 
> consider
> consonance to be relative,  (but I digress.)
>       Listeners rarely register a faster than ET third as out of tune, 
> they
> are not listening like piano techs.  The version of the Pathetique on
> "Beethoven in the Temperaments" is a prime example.  The Ab section, on a 
> Prinz, has
> an unrelenting 21 cent third in the harmony.  Tuners have often told me 
> how out
> of tune that sounds, and music lovers have often told me that it was the 
> most
> expressive recording of that piece they had heard.  This is why I 
> mentioned
> the reception being dependent on expectations.  As tuners, we rarely can 
> be
> objective about what we hear, since many of us, by training, compare what 
> we hear
> to what we expect.
>
>
>>> If you argue that WTs sound more
> sonorous than ET and that people respond to that difference then it is the
> slower beating thirds which are responsible for that, even if they are 
> only
> slightly more slowly beating. <<
>
>     A WT has keys that are more consonant, yes, but that is not the
> attraction.  It is the musical texture that arises that gives the music a 
> more
> engaging quality.  If composed skillfully, when a passage moves into more 
> dissonant
> territory, then comes back, the listener feels a resolution without being
> consciously aware of why.  I think that people respond to this on a 
> subliminal
> level,(techs are excluded, since we are usually listening to the tuning as 
> opposed
> to the music), and the attraction comes from the texture, not the simple 
> fact
> that there are more consonant intervals in some keys.  A friend that 
> played a
> 1/4 comma meantone told me that after about 10 minutes, he was bored.  He
> said that everything sounded the same, except the wolf keys, which he 
> couldn't
> use.
>     I think the biggest shortcoming of ET and MT is their quality of
> "sameness" to the keys.
>
>>>By the same token it would then stand to
> reason that if you played in keys on the backside of the circle of
> fifths--those keys with 4 or more sharps and flats--that those keys would
> sound less sonorous, which is what I hear. <<
>
>     It depends on how those keys are used.  Consonance is not the be-all 
> and
> end-all of music, and it is not the only benefit to be found in a WT.
>     Composers often write 10ths or 17ths in the remote keys that create
> beating at speeds found in vocal music's vibrato.  Used in this way, 
> tempering
> becomes a coloring agent without providing dissonance.
>
>>>While the contrast may create a
> more unpredictable and therefore interesting palette, I think it can be
> misleading to use the sonority argument as there is both greater and 
> lesser
> sonority depending on the key.   >>
>
>        The contrast is not exactly unpredictable. The rise and fall of the
> tempering in the passages as one goes through a sonata almost always seems 
> to
> be intended, Composers, it appears, took advantage of the various levels 
> of
> consonance to strengthen the emotional power of their music. In classical 
> music,
> we never find a light-hearted, happy melody in F# or B nor do we  usually 
> find
> sad dreary music in Am, etc.
>        The manner in which Beethoven used the keys demonstrates his 
> ability
> to use the temperament to create coherently increasing tension leading up 
> to
> resolutions. In this, the contrast is very predictable. It is also 
> possibly the
> reason he was so adamant about people not transposing his keyboard works.
> They simply do not hold together if played in a key other than that which 
> he
> composed them in. If transposed, on a WT, instead of three or four chords
> becoming increasingly tempered as he composes up to a climax, then 
> resolving to a
> place of lower tension,(ie, tempering), in a transposed key, the same 
> passage
> produces an odd hodgepodge of tempering and often has a passage resolving 
> into a
> much more highly tempered key, which just sounds and feels awful.
>         On ET, none of these questions or considerations matters, but on a
> WT, pieces written during the WT era really only work the way the composer
> intended in the key that it was written.   As I write that, it occurs to 
> me that
> that must be true for all music. Pitch *has* gone up a half step during 
> the
> piano's lifetime, but the relative values of tempering have been extremely
> consistant from Werckmeister through the Ellis documented factory workers 
> 200 years
> later.
>
> >>Also, I find it somewhat contradictory to
> say that people can both hear the difference and respond to it but don't
> really register the difference at the same time.<<
>
>      This is exactly what happens, in my experience.  The effects of
> temperament on the non-technician are usually subliminal.  The autonomous 
> nervous
> system registers the differing levels of tempering, as evidenced by 
> indicators of
> emotional states.  I think it would be more accurate to say that people 
> feel
> the difference,  but even so, it seems to me that music written before 
> 1900
> has much more effect when played on a tuning that supports that harmonic
> architecture.  Some of the later composers don't seem to be as sensitive 
> to
> temperament, and some of the earlier ones demand it to be properly 
> presented.  I am
> thinking about the meantone era, mainly.  Baroque keyboard music on ET is
> something I no longer care to listen to,
>    My personal opinion is that as far as consonance goes, there is none in
> ET and too much in meantone.  Only in a WT environment can I decide what 
> level
> of contrast is appropriate, and actually place true consonance under the 
> hands
> of a pianist. The effect can be dramatic, (or totally invisible, some 
> people
> don't hear a difference)!
>
> Ed Foote RPT
> http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html
> www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
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