source file: mills2.txt
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 10:05:05 +0200

Subject: Temperaments/tyros/neophytes

From: A440A@aol.com

Greetings,  
two snipped parts of posts follow,  I didn't mean to change anybody's words,
 and I basically am talking about pianos here,  some things may be
inapplicable to orchestral music....

Recently posted; 
  Bill Alves( I think?)was quoted;
>I think the value of tuning
>knowledge for the understanding of music is greatly underrated in   
general.
>(As Lou Harrison says: You haven't heard a piece until you've heard it   
in
>the tuning that the composer intended or expected.)

and Gordon Collins  replies
>>>.. and on the intended instruments, with the intended performance   
>>>technique, with the intended phrasing, etc.  These are all important   
>>>performance considerations - change any one of them and the performance   
>suffers.  The particular tuning used, however, is probably the least   
>>>noticeable of these.  How many people can tell the difference between   
>>>12TET and 5-limit JI in a string quartet played with the usual vibrato?

     I don't know if I can agree with this.    I have never heard a string
quartet play in 12 TET. They often say that is what they are doing, but they
always fall into a more tonally centered Pythagorean as they play.  Who is
going to accept a constant 14 cent wide major3rd everwhere, in all keys, in a
string quartet?   If a quartet played in true equal, I don't think the
audience would be talking about phrasing when the curtain dropped.  
      
G.C. again;
>In many cases, the most difficult of these considerations for a   
>historically informed performer to determine is which tuning the composer   
>intended.
 
     I think it is easier to decide on  a musically proper temperament for
Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, etal.  than it is to find agreement on phrasing.
 There are a limited number of temperaments that would have had been
available.  Most of them have been written down, debated, buttressed and
supported,etc, and since the common forms were near universally shared, with
listening, one can usually find the temperament point in the historical line
that provides a rendition of a piece that works best, ( from a standpoint of
tonality levels). In comparison,  phrasing is poorly described by the written
note or word,  it is so  controlled by the human emotion at the time of
performance, that written guides are no guarantee of us hearing what the old
guys had in mind.  ( OH if somebody could take a small DAT back two hundred
years!!)  
 

>       But those students you mention are not accepting 12TET -   
>they're only accepting that there are 12 notes in an octave, *roughly*   
evenly distributed in pitch.  How many of them even know what 12TET is?   
> To most of them, "tuning" is a verb, not a noun, and "temperament" is a   
>psychological term.

      Well,  we all have to do our parts if we want to turn this around.  It
is changing, I know from the piano technicians list,  that there are many
more people promoting choice in tuning today than there was 25 years ago when
I began tuning professionally. 
      I recently completed teaching a course here at Vanderbilt on
Intonation, keyboards, and Temperaments, and I had the time to take students
from the basic theory of string behavior and overtones, ( with a side order
of inharmonicity, they all had tuning hammers!) to the workings of intervals,
and basic construction of temperaments. 
       They responded rather quickly to exposure to pure thirds on the
keyboard,  a comment made when the first ET major 3rd went to pure was, "
Wow,  that Sounds like Mozart!  It proved to be a "vector" course, in that it
helped them grasp much more from a wide variety of courses they were already
in.  ( some of the music theory faculty mentioned that they were starting to
recognize which students had been in my course by the questions that they
were getting from them!.  this is good)
      I propose that students, ( like the majority of 20th century
listeners), want to hear something other than 12ET,  as it really has been a
scientific detour heading for an entropic dead-end. It is an important
temperament, but it is not the realized ideal that 18th and 19th century
theorists argued,   rather, it has gone from  being a necessary handhold to
an artistic snag that we have been hung up on long enough.  When tonal music
is played on an atonal tuning,  the color is gone from the picture, the juice
is nearly out of the grape, the emotional click track is locked  , the.....
ouch! ( metaphors will snap if stretched too far.....)   ah well, talk is
cheap, but a good CD will set you back $15.  

     We just finished the "Beethoven in the Temperaments-Historical tunings
on the Modern Concert Grand" CD project here.   Things went well, the dampers
were sanded and softened, ( yes, I "voice" dampers for  recording work!), the
hammers were in great shape ( to get hammers to "peak", just when you want to
record the piano is not always easy to do), and the artist, Enid Katahn was,
as we say in Nashville, "totally in the pocket".
    We have four big sonatas on the Steinway D tuned in two different well
temperaments.  We used the Kirnberger III, ( aka the Prinz to the Jorgensen
crowd), for those killer 1/4 comma early keys.  That is a good tuning for the
Pathetique,  and the first four chords take you about as far out into the
"churn" as you can imagine.  The Op.14 no.1 does a really nice job of showing
how Emaj can be used to create an uptempo piece of music.  In fact, the
artist chose this one, because it had never been interesting until she played
it in a well temperament,  then she felt it was a new piece!
     We used the Young ( 1799) for the Moonlight and the Waldstein,  as these
pieces felt too harsh in the stronger temperament.......... And that brings
me to what I really wanted to talk about:

   This tuning list seems to be attractive to those of us that are
investigating alternatives to the status quo of 12TET,  ( How I do miss
McLaren's jousting!!).  Sometimes, sitting here in the warm cyber-glow of the
pot-bellied Macintosh, it feels like we are on a temperament crusade.
  Amongst ourselves, we find  good reason to lament the public's  seeming
indifference to supporting the microtonalist universe. I myself have to just
sorta cast off and drift when I hear a lot of "alternative tuning", but I
like it because it doesn't "scare" me, though, I wish I had the time to
understand what H'stick calls the "math monsters".   It has been pointed out
before that micronoodling, and mindless sound in abstruse tunings is
counterproductive to the Temperament Crusades.  I suppose, but really can't
say. 
     I can say that there are ways to improve your chances of converting some
poor, in-the-dark, 12TET junkie  with a carefully thought out pitch, and
there are ways to introduce a listener to alternatives that will turn them
off, ( I mean,  I learned in high school that one should get past the first
introduction before asking if the cheerleader and her sister wanted to " go
get nekkid and drink some beer").  This is equal to hitting somebody first
with Beethoven on a meantone tuning.  It will not usually impress anybody,
and once turned off by "different tuning" many stay turned off.   

      There is an adjustment needed for ears accustomed to only 12ET.  The
first exposure to key color is often a shock, and the feeling that "something
is amiss"  should be expected.  It is on second hearing that the alien nature
of tonal contrast is gone, and the composers emotional circuitry really
starts to kick in.  
      I made this point last year, but since I am sitting here, scandously
spending bandwidths and weekends,   I will say it again;

     If we are to expect students, or anyone else, to leave the security of
the familiar, such as 12 TET,  it is easier if we take them first to familiar
music played on the unfamiliar tunings, ( as we are going to try in Beethoven
in the Temperaments),  than it is to get them to accept new music on new
tunings simultaneously..  
    
  Once a listener hears Beethoven's ( or Bach's)  use of highly tempered
intervals contrasted to pure, they are more comfortable with the idea for a
wide variety of musical tunings. Hopefully, the temperaments of tomorrow will
come from minds that have some historical perspective on what this 12 TET
actually sounds like.  You really can't explain to a fish that it is wet,
until you take it out of the water. The difference between knowing only one
temperament and knowing two, is greater than the difference between knowing
two and knowing twenty.  
       Since taking that first step away from a supposedly  "secure"  place
is difficult for many musicians, ( especially those that have invested their
lives in ET), it behooves all of us to be aware of the special needs of the
neophyte, and perhaps not give them the strongest medicine first when
introducing the tonic of tonality   ( was that a musical pun, or what?)

     And I gotta say, this list has about the best signal to noise ratio of
any I am on.  Thanks to everybody for that.  

   
Regards, 
Ed Foote 
Precision Piano Works
Nashville, Tn. 

     
 

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