source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 04:50:46 -0700 Subject: Re: the Bach wars From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com> My personal opinion - and I know that many will disagree - is that deciding between equal-temperaments and most well-temperaments is a comparative small concern. The differences between these temperaments, although certainly historically significant and worth discussing, are fairly small in total overall sound, compared to quarter-comma meantone for example. Everything I've read and heard suggests that well-temperaments were fairly fluid at the time. Everybody had his or her own favorite, often based on how the organ in that particular town's church was tuned. Harpsichords and clavichords had to be retuned virtually every time you sit down to play them, so they weren't much of an absolute reference like pianos are nowadays. Regarding Bach's Lute works, I suppose it's worth pointing out that while he composed them with the lute in mind, he himself never had time to master the lute as a performer. He therefore wrote them on what computer nerds like me might jokingly call a "lute emulator" - a specialized harpsichord called a Lautenwerk. So those works were probably written with equal-temperament in mind, but when he himself played them, they were probably were in whatever well-temperament caught his fancy at the time. Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 19:18 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA24372; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 10:18:34 -0700 Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 10:18:34 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu