source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 10:18:34 -0700 Subject: Re: the Bach wars From: Johnny Reinhard On Wed, 27 Sep 1995, Neil Haverstick wrote: > 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? The term "Gleichschwebenden Temperatur" for equal temperament was certainly in use in Bach's time, and I think you are right...Bach would have had *The Equal Tempered Clavier* if that was his explicit aim. 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? There was no absolute pitch concept in the Baroque period so an A could be almost anywhere in the range of an octave, usually dependent on the church organ nearby. Since some of the keys in well temperaments mirror equal temperament, of course writing for lute in this fashion would be no problem. Keep in mind that Bach favored the freless cello for continuo over the freted gamba, implying that it was need for its pitch flexibility. 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)? It would have been easier to reach for a perfectly just chord on a fretless instrument than to to try reaching for an equally-tempered chord. If not for serious ear-training in equal temperament, one could never navigate logarithmic equal distances of _any_ interval. At least the just harmonies are contained inherently in the harmonics of the strings themselves. > 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. Remember that that Baroque violin had a bow that could easily play 4-note chords, forcing modern violinists to arpeggiate and increasing the difficulty of getting the piece across. He was certainly practical enough not to trust any great writing to the bassoons, which during his time and vicinity, were poorly played and unreliable instruments. It was indeed a practical concern that one wrote music that could be played in different places by different performers...and possibly in slightly different tunings. > 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 Neil, I haven't seen anything on the list about MICROSTOCK. Care to elaborate? (smile) Johnny Reinhard Director American Festival of Microtonal Music, Inc. reinhard@styx.ios.com Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 19:31 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA25064; Thu, 28 Sep 1995 10:31:12 -0700 Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 10:31:12 -0700 Message-Id: <9509281030.aa09972@cyber.cyber.net> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu