Perhaps this discussion could advance by distinguishing between descriptive and prescriptive accounts of historical tuning practice. It seems to me that most writings that have been cited here were prescriptive, instructing tuners how to achieve certain results. What's lacking are reliable descriptions of those results; in other words, did tuners follow directions closely, or interpret them case by case, or generally ignore them? Were the prescriptions something more than idealized constructs, that is, basically theoretical, or were they accurately, precisely applied? Can we know this? I submit that we can't, and that assumptions about how tuners actually worked and the results they obtained are no more reliable than assumptions about how performers expressed the ideas represented by music notation. All we have are isolated bits of evidence, not all necessarily reliable, that, taken together, give only a very incomplete notion of "authenticity". That's not to say that historical inquiry is a waste of time, but we shouldn't confuse the interesting outline that emerges from our research with what really happened. Laurence -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100424/d53e937d/attachment.htm>
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