source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:12:59 -0800 Subject: more on the piano / how about? From: Daniel Wolf <106232.3266@compuserve.com> Two Items: (1) Anyone who has spent time playing early (western) keyboard music in historical tunings has heard that the intervals and tonalities furthest from just in intonation often take on a structural role in compositions. It is vivid to hear the point of furthest harmonic remove in the development of a classical sonata when this is also the least well tuned portion of the keyboard. Of course, music through 1812 or so is normally composed with a closer homology between keyboard tuning and harmonic structure than later music, but the landmark works of late romanticism (i.e. after Chopin) are almost exclusively orchestral. (And the best late romantic literature for the piano was written for instruments with Viennese construction, which have a much lighter frame). My reading of Jorgenson is quite different in that I take _Victorian Tunings_ to be an indication of the continued inability/undesireability to get 12tet exactly. These tuning coincide with the earliest accurate measurements of actual tunings, which show clearly the appreciable deviations from 12tet. Moreover, there is a well-established sense of key characteristics that is not explainable on the basis of pitch height - which varied considerably - but must be explained largely on the basis of intonation. (I distinguish these key characteristics from the pitch characteristics used by Skryabin and Hauer in the 20th century - which are solely based on pitch height). (2) It would be a great service to the tuning community at large if someone were able to take a frequency counter into a WestLAMusic / Sam Ash sort of store (or better yet, to a music trade fair) and actually measure the tuning resolution of commercially available instruments and digital tuners. I would do it here, but German music store owners tend to be unfriendly about questions _already answered_ in the handbooks. Daniel Wolf Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 19 Nov 1996 09:42 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA17266; Tue, 19 Nov 1996 09:43:48 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA17468 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id AAA13575; Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:43:45 -0800 Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:43:45 -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