Israel Stein wrote: > So I sort of doubt it that in a busy, hectic life like this, J.S. got up > every morning, ate his breakfast and then, while sitting down to his > labors, would think "let's see what am I going to be playing today - I > think I'll tune the harpsichord this way". It is much more likely that he > tuned it in some sort of circulating temperament that would work for > anything that his hectic day might demand of him - and of course it is > quite likely that he didn't fuss too much about getting precisely the same > exact tuning every day (like we do) - but anything that had the general > properties he found serviceable would do... I just don't think it could > have been quite as deliberate and targeted to specific music as your > conjecture suggests. > > Israel Stein Israel, This reflects my thinking as well and is along the lines with what I meant. When you also wrote: "You are looking at the issues from the 20th-21st century perspective." Well, yes. Absolutely. We don't live then. We live now. The majority of keyboardists rely on professional tuners. A complete, stable modern tuning requires an hour, minimum, if we didn't have a big drop in humidity overnight. 20th-21st century instruments need to be as versatile and stable as possible. We use them for music from all eras and genres (in every key) and it is completely impractical to impose tunings which will be unusable for a majority of those who need the piano. The value received from imposing historical tunings in our world today, on modern instruments, can't possibly measure up to the value of the effort required to produce it. For historical tunings to be implemented today would require the constant presence of a professional tuner to attend to a small handful of instruments. Since we can't possibly know exactly which systems were used for which composer, or which instrument or how well they were executed, it seems an exercise in futility today to implement them. "Plus, there is a factor here that has not been mentioned in this discussion, to my knowledge - when exactly the idea of key color was current, and what might have happened to it later and why..." ...and how anyone ever came to describe "out-of-tuneness" as "color". The fact is that older tuning systems did as best as they could to tune one basic chord. Depending on the system, some other chords would also be acceptable. Everything else in the system is actually out of tune. That is not something a composer would have had to have dealt with with orchestral, choral, or as someone pointed out, fretted instrument composition. I suppose "color" is a creative artist's description of what is, if you think about it, ignorant incompetence. ET puts all chords equally out of tune, but not so much as the obscure keys from the older systems, leaving the instrument more versatile, and more congruent with everything else around it. "Key color and key differences are quite important in the Baroque era (17th and 18th centuries - roughly early 1600's to mid 1800)'s. This is when you find discussions of "affects" (which is how the idea of key color/key feeling was referred to)." The "effects" of a chord being "out of tune". I'm sure they dealt with what they had as best they could, and probably used more tame language than I would to describe out of tune chords - make it sound as if they were using "effects" purposefully - artistically - regarding something they had little ability to otherwise affect. Marketing their image was as important to them then as it is today. Regardless of what is written, I find it difficult to believe a composer would actually prefer a tuning system which limited his abilities to modulate as the progressions naturally led, when he didn't have to deal with that limitation for other forms of composition. "Once you get well into the 18th century there isn't much written about it. The question then becomes, is it because these consideration have become so routinely accepted that there is no need to discuss them any more, or is it because the notion has come into disuse? And once you get into the pre-Classical and Classical era, are these notions falling completely into disuse, or are they still persisting?" My thinking is along the lines of how you describe what you think Bach probably did -- tuners and players had learned how to tune an instrument in such a manner that would accommodate most anything reasonably well, despite how we interpret today the written discriptions from the past of how to tune. There were tuning systems in existence, certainly by the end of the 18th century, which described well how to accomplish such a tuning that today we would have difficulty distinguishing from ET. "Speaking of limitations imposed by keyboard compass, I can show places where Beethoven changed the melody when he ran out of keys - rather than write in a different key. So that argument holds no water." Actually, I think that makes my point, editing the composition being the alternative to changing the initial beginning key or starting over. Obviously, the order of notes in his melody was less important than something else. That doesn't necessarily mean he was insisting on a certain tuning "effect". We don't know what tuning he was actually hearing, and if he didn't have a reasonably equal tuning, we don't know how he would have received an equal tuning that would have allowed him to begin at any point on the keyboard. There would have been a lot of work to do to rewrite from the beginning just because the keyboard ran out of keys on one end or the other. There may have been an effect on the bass end of the keys he was insisting on that affected what he did in the top end. We don't really know why he chose not to change keys. But it doesn't necessarily indicate that any effects produced by in tune or out of tune tonal modes was the reason. "So whenever discussing music in history, we really need to get rid of our notions based on current practice and expectations..." But we most certainly have to keep current practice and expectations into account when doing our work today. Tuning historical temperaments is interesting novelty for demonstration purposes. But what we actually know about what was actually practiced is speculation at best. The possibilities are practically endless. For modern practice and application, historical temperaments are impractical - the chase of a rabbit we know we can never catch - and it is my opinion that we are wise to spend our short, valuable time on less trivial pursuits. Jeff
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