I'll reread this all again later when I have time, but I have always held the position regarding Rameau that his comments from 1737 are not relevant to the volumes of music written long before. Interesting, but not relevant. dennis. ______ On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Fred Sturm <fssturm at unm.edu> wrote: > > On Apr 13, 2010, at 11:22 AM, Laurence Libin wrote: > > Fred, Rameau's remarks from 1737 might or might not indicate equal > temperament as we understand it (he might have had in mind a circulating > temperament that approximates equal), > > > Here I am going to disagree. Rameau is very clear in laying out his > arguments for ET, calling it the natural tuning for the rational system of > harmony he was espousing. The fifth being more basic than the third, it > should be as pure as possible. His practical instructions are crude: a > circle of fifths upward from C, each "un petit peu" (a very little bit) > narrow, with the proof being FC at the end also being a little narrow. But > there is no evidence that I know of to suggest any other alternate > circulating temperament (for Rameau and for France of that period) than a > flavor of modified mean tone we know today as French Ordinaire. > > but a character piece like *L'Enharmonique* from the ca. 1728 *Nouvelles > suites* kind of misses its point in ET. The chords under the fermata in > bar 12 of the reprise, in the midst of the descending bass line > g-f-e-d-c#-b-b flat-a flat-g, are all about cringe, it seems to me. > > > No argument there. Rameau changed his mind. He wrote quite eloquently in > the 1720s about unequal temperament, and its expressive qualities. Rousseau > later threw those writings back in his face, saying Rameau got it right the > first time, and his ET proposal lost all that expressiveness inherent in > UET. > But the point I was trying to make is that what is expressive in one > context can be painfully "out of tune" in another. To take a more modern > example, jazz musicians often bend pitch in a "blue note." Suppose we tune > that note on a piano to a "blue" pitch, say B flat in the key of C. Nice and > expressive in that context. Now we want to play in the key of B flat. All of > a sudden, what was expressive has become unbearable. > It's just the centuries old conundrum of fixed pitch. What is given in one > place is taken away in another. For a style of music which is written with a > tuning pattern in mind, well and good. When we try to impose that tuning > pattern on another body of music, it may be very inappropriate. Some of the > 20th/21st century experimentation with UETs has been aimed seemingly at a > compromise that will cover all bases. My question (which I doubt can be > answered definitively) concerns where the boundary lies between enhancement > and detriment, between significant and insignificant. > When we arrive at something like the Di Veroli "almost-equal" pattern, with > offsets from ET of 0.27, 0.54, 0.81, 1.08 plus and minus, we are probably in > the realm where belief trumps ears, in my practical opinion (I like it fine > as a theoretical model). Partly, this opinion is based on the inevitable > accumulation of error in actually tuning instruments. It is rare to tune > with more refinement than unisons within a range of 0.5 cents, let alone the > precision with which the pitch of any given note is placed. Fine differences > disappear in the chatter of random error. But perhaps there are people with > more acute hearing than I have (and with better tuning chops, capable of > achieving these niceties with precision), who can tell the difference > between that pattern and ET, without carefully listening to beat rates of > thirds in isolation. > Regards, > Fred Sturm > University of New Mexico > fssturm at unm.edu > > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100413/bf2c35a5/attachment-0001.htm>
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