source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 23:41:38 -0700 Subject: the Bach wars From: neil.haverstick@csst.com (Neil Haverstick) Haverstick here...I must confess that I am greatly enjoying the ongoing Bach debate...Bach is a personal favorite of mine, and I feel that he is the greatest "western" composer to date. While I do not have the scholarly background of a lot of the folks on the forum, I nonetheless have a great curiosity to learn as much as possible about subjects that interest me. Thus, I want to pose a few questions regarding the great German, and hopefully some of you real smart types out there will further my education by your answers. Here goes... 1. Since Bach called his great keyboard work "The Well Tempered Clavichord" (or was it Clavier?), wouldn't that imply that it was composed in well, not equal, temperament? Am I overlooking something here? 2. Bach composed a number of works for lute, and was, I have read, friends with the great lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss ( they supposedly jammed together on one occasion)...I am supposing lutes were tuned in equal temperament, since they had straight, not staggered, frets, and I am thus assuming that Bach composed these works in equal temperament...am I in the ballpark? 3. Bach composed a number of solo violin and cello suites...since these were for unaccompanied instruments, could the performers have used pure intervals when they played them? Or, since some of the pieces had chords in them, which must be next to impossible to finger on these instruments, were they meant to be equal tempered as well? Would a performer back then ever mix temperaments in a performance (of course, I mean in a solo work)? I get a feeling from Bach that he was a practical man, and that the ideas he presented in his works were the most important issue, not the execution, per se. In other words, the aforementioned solo violin pieces are so difficult on violin (and so much more playable on guitar, for example) that one wonders why he wrote them for this instrument in the first place. Perhaps his inner world was so rich in musical voices that he didn't really care about the medium on which these ideas were expressed. Of course, we're all supposing, to one degree or another, just what happened back then, but it is fun to speculate. I am looking forward to some responses to my questions, so have at it...and don't forget to come to Denver for the MICROSTOCK festival on October 21st...see you, Hstick Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 11:22 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id CAA15350; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 02:22:39 -0700 Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 02:22:39 -0700 Message-Id: <0099711D0E0BF5FF.28CB@ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu