source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 12:30:39 -0800 Subject: TUNING digest 897 From: Daniel Wolf <106232.3266@compuserve.com> Re: Alves on the piano. Owen Jorgensen has demonstrated how variable actual piano tunings are; his most recent book - someone on the list should have the exact reference, I am without most of my library - suggesting that through the nineteenth century and well into our own, twelfth root of two tuning has been the accidental exception and not the rule and that a lot of western repertoire ought to be reconsidered in this light. Late nineteenth century music is much more interesting intonationally than is usually assumed! I recommend listening to a historical instrument recording of the Brahms Horn Trio (the Hermann Baumann recording is excellent): the combination of violin, valveless horn, and piano is a vivid demonstration of intonational variety and techniques for compromise in performance by instruments with radically different intonational structures. The New Grove article on the horn has a chart for valveless horn in a (meantone?) tuning where sharps and flats are clearly dinstinct pitches; classical violin technique has decided Pythagorean tendencies; a good piano tuner would preseumably have been expected to have this in mind in tuning before a concert. Even today, at Hessischer Rundfunk and other radio stations in Germany, the piano tuner will ask the conductor or pianist before the concert about what keys (tonalities) will be played. And the best tuners here continue to work without the stroboscope. Clearly, equal temperament is part of the model for tuning, but other considerations define the exact nature of the particular temperament. The main affect of the late nineteenth century piano is that one need not tune so often because the more rigid wires and heavier pin block and general structure hold the the tuning better against both changes in the weather and frequent playing. That this reduction in frequency of tunings may have led to a demand for a more all-purpose brand of tuning is possible, but unlikely, in that composers would have been among those most frequently receiving new tunings. It is striking to note, in this regard that three of the most prominent composers associated with the sins of 12tet (Berlioz, Wagner, Schoenberg) were not pianists, and composed away from the keyboard. Members of the Gamelan list have made many similar reference to the ways in which the instruments without fixed intonation and voices vary from the tuning of the fixed pitch instruments; I have also observed this in mainland Southeastasian musics. Daniel Wolf Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 17 Nov 1996 01:46 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA14759; Sun, 17 Nov 1996 01:47:29 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA14742 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id QAA13426; Sat, 16 Nov 1996 16:47:27 -0800 Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 16:47:27 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu