Claudio Di Veroli, via Kent Swafford writes: >>Some tuners and writers believe that unequal temperaments were still predominant in the 19th century. There is plenty of evidence: with the only exception of English speaking countries, they weren't.<< Hmm, they weren't predominant in the literature, but there are some unexplained facts about the practical results, as evidenced by the compostions for piano that were created. More on that later. >>This is not a matter of opinion: it has been thoroughly investigated by the best scholars on temperament (such as Prof. Barbieri), unearthing thousands of documents on the matter which, albeit in scattered books and papers, fully depict the progress of E.T. country by country c.1750-1900.<< Widely shared findings, no matter how extensive, do not create a fact. I submit that it has to be opinion, unless there is someone here that was there, then. Otherwise, we are left to consider the writings of people who may have had some other agenda, perhaps wanting to appear cutting edge, or not appearing old and dated,(as Bach's music was at one time?). There is a far distance between writing about it and actually doing it. I wonder how many of those documents are musical scores, since the composers' use of keys indicate a consistent, widely shared pattern. This pattern has absolutely nothing to do with equality. More on that later, too. >>Surely enough, throughout the 19th c. (even outside unequally tempered English speaking countries) one finds plenty of written proposals for unequal temperaments! However, most of them EITHER include the complaint that most musicians were using ET instead, OR come from places and times where other documents show that ET was prevalent. There is further indirect evidence confirming this.<< I don't know how to read "most musicians." Is this keyboard only? It must be, since string musicians, even today, saturated with ET, do not use ET when left to themselves, (at least, that is how it appears to me, sitting in the audience with my SAT on my lap. I hear, and see, just intervals everywhere.) When the piano appears, matching pitch occurs in the melodic area, but I often hear clashing harmony, quickly corrected to be in unison. The better the musician, the quicker the correction, but it is still prevalent. >>As for the often-repeated story that accurate ET was only possible after White's book of 1917, this is another myth. Beat rates were first published in 1749 in a best-selling English book. Modern research -- tuning experiments included -- shows how, even without beat rates, the piano-tuning methods for ET had progressed c.1830 to the point where they would not yield an audible difference from today's standards.<< Are we to believe that the tuners in the field, in a particularly avant-garde break with tradition, instantly embraced this new, more difficult, often denigrated, style of tuning? If so, we must accept that the normal tuner of 1830 was more willing to change a long, historical, tradition than tuners of today. How did Steinway's 'Ludwig' get instruction to tune a WT in Romania in the 1950s? Why was Henry Freeman, in (1970 Monroe, Louisiana, still of the opinion that the C-E third had to be "good, even if it means that the sharp keys were a little ragged"? He had learned from older tuners, and it seems that there was a tradition of something other than exact ET, even then. >>I cannot certainly be suspected of favoring ET, having been for decades an introducer and staunch supporter of historically-informed performance using unequal temperaments. Yet, I am reluctant to tune unequal whenever evidence shows that the music was in all likelihood written with ET in mind.<< Evidence is always subject to interpretation. According to Jorgensen, Murray Barbour said very clearly that a WT piano would sound like an out of tune piano. However, I have had numerous pianists, of very high caliber, comment on how in-tune a WT piano sounded. Something isn't adding up here, for me. >> An interesting writing by a famous Italian physicist complained in 1790 that Mozart was using the "wrong" ET system. << I find it interesting that a physicist would not understand that there is only one ET. Seems that he would have complained that Mozart was not using ET. Could it be that in 1790, "ET" was being used to describe something other than the one and only ET we know today? After a couple of centuries of restrictive Meantone, something like a Young could easily have been regarded as "equal." At the time, a healthy man was expected to live to be perhaps 50 years old, today, we don't consider that healthy. (OK, that is a stretched analogy, but I use it to illustrate the malleable nature of nomenclature.) >>Schubert would in all likelihood use ET as well, also because it was in use in the ensembles he played with/conducted.<< I don't know what kind of "ensembles" are being referred to here, but if they were string ensembles, I question if they were closer to ET than s imply avoiding the enharmonic pitfalls of Ab not being G#. I am not a proponent of WT for Schubert because of research, but rather, because the response of pianists has overwhelmingly been so positive inre the sound of non-ET tuning. I find that I have a more responsive clientele when I tune in something other than ET. Was it so different 200 years ago? Even in blind tests, technicians themselves, who know better than anyone else the sound of ET, favor a non-ET tuning. Have we somehow gone full circle and find ourselves tuning in equal when we really prefer the sound of non? How did Bill Bremmer's tuning end up the favored temperament when compared to the ET? (Rhode Island convention? Jon Page was there, maybe he can supply the dates.) One of the hardest facts to get around, (and this is not opinion, but fact), is the proportion in which composers used the various keys. With some minor idiosyncrasies (such as LVB's favoring Eb), the choice of home keys mimics the rising tempering of the thirds, with C being far and away the most used key and F# being far and away the least used. This is fact, not opinion. For instance: If we add up 337 separate pieces of music composed for keyboard between 1760 and 1835, we see a pattern in key choice. These pieces cover a large part of Mozart's compositions, (21 sonatas, 17 variations, 26 solo keyboard pieces), Beethoven (27 sonatas, 199 variations, 32 other assorted keyboard works), Schubert (12 sonatas and 3 waltzes). What we find used for home keys in the aggregate total, is: 1. C= 122 times, 2. F= 44 3. Bb = 24 4. Eb= 33 5. Ab = 3 6. C# = 1 7. F#= 1 8. B = 0 9. E = 3 10. A= 37 11. D= 50 12. G= 24 The figures are quite close to the graphing of the M3's width. There is some bias in there because of the 199 Beethoven variations, and Beethoven really liked Eb, (which I suspect because of its access to harmonic resouces in both directions). If we take the Beethoven variations out of the equation, it looks like this; 1. C= 37 times, 2. F= 21 3. Bb = 14 4. Eb= 18 5. Ab = 3 6. C# = 0 7. F#= 0 8. B = 0 9. E = 0 10. A= 12 11. D= 15 12. G= 24 If we look at only Mozart, we see that in 21 sonatas the keys are used thusly: 1. C= 5 times, 2. F= 5 3. Bb = 4 4. Eb= 1 5. Ab = 0 6. C# = 0 7. F#= 0 8. B = 0 9. E = 0 10. A= 1 11. D= 3 12. G= 2 If Mozart had use of an equally tempered keyboard, what can explain his avoidance of 5 perfectly usable keys, right across the circle of fifths most remote from the key of C? If we look at 12 Schubert sonatas, we see: 1. C= 4 2. F= 0 3. Bb = 2 4. Eb= 1 5. Ab = 0 6. C# = 0 7. F#= 0 8. B = 0 9. E = 0 10. A= 3 11. D= 2 12. G= 0 If Schubert had use of an equally tempered keyboard, what can explain his avoidance of 5 perfectly usable keys, right across the circle of fifths most remote from the key of C? He also avoided G and F, but that is within the idiosyncratic bounds. Now, if we look at the Young temperament, (which I am using as an idealized form of WT), we see a remarkable congruence between the width of the M3's and the proportion of key choice listed above: 1. C= 5 cents 2. F= 8 3. Bb = 10 4. Eb= 14 5. Ab = 18 6. C# = 19 7. F#= 21 8. B = 19 9. E = 18 10. A= 14 11. D= 10 12. G= 8 Not only is the cumulative total of compositions directly correlated to tempering in a generalized WT, each individual composers' use of the keys mimics virtually the same progression! Is this coincidence? I don't think so. There is more, of course. I didn't have the time to run totals on the minor keys as used by the composers, but from the slight counting I did, it appears it follows the same linkage to tempering. It is also interesting that the gradual democratization of key usage mimics, chronologically, the general acceptance of ET as Jorgensen posits. By the time we get to Rachmaninoff, there is far less 'shape' to the graph, and once in the 20th century, no bias towards the keys at all, just what we would expect to happen if ET finally gained predominence as Jorgensen proposes. So, I find it implausible that these three composers just happened to share the same attraction for the various keys, in near identical proportion. And it makes sense to me that as we progress from 1750 to 1900, we see a gradual increase of the more remote keys used as home. I believe that the composer's keyboard compositions were definitely influenced by non equal tempering through Chopin. They chose those keys for a reason, and I would love to hear what else it could have been. Later in the century, Chopin appears. It appears that his use of home keys is a mirror image of the other composers, lending even more credence that he was reacting to tempering, just in a diametrically opposed fashion. The shape of the pattern is still there, just totally reversed. I would love to see a more exhaustive compilation of compostions on Rollingball.com, but this is a lot of work. Food for thought. I tune the temperaments that please my customers the most. It is the best employment insurance I can find. It has not proven to be ET for everyone. Is it a stretch to assume the tuner of 1800 was any different? Regards, Ed Foote RPT http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html <BR><BR><BR>**************<BR>A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1215855013x1201028747/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072%26h mpgID=62%26bcd=DecemailfooterNO62)</HTML>
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