Music of the spheres.....

[Billbrpt@aol.com]

In a message dated 98-02-03 19:06:41 EST, you write:

<< These ideas about universal harmony hark back to an old and discredited
 concept called "The music of the spheres", which held that the orbits of the
planets corresponded to a musical harmonic series. >>

Once, a guy tried to tell me that this was what the HT's were all about.  I
actually resisted the concept for many years myself, I used to tune the ET by
pure 5ths.
One day I was working in a local rebuilder's shop.   I thought he was really
bananas about HT's.  He showed me a piano tuned in the Rameau-Rousseau-Hall
18th Century Modified Meantone Temperament (which, by the way will be my
recommendation for Rameau on Michel LaChance's quiz when I get the time to
fill it out).  It was the most severe-sounding, bizarre temperament I had ever
heard in my life at least from my perspective at the time.

I remember thinking to myself that this temperament would never work on
anything I would ever tune for.  Then, as I was working and minding my own
business, a pianist who often liked to visit that shop came in and played a
long set of Brahms.  My life was changed forever.  It was never any thing that
anyone said to try to convince me, it was what I heard in the music!  It was
something I never imagined could come out of a piano!   (The same thing might
happen to you if you get Ed Foote's CD and/or if you attend the HT Recital in
Providence.)

So today, when I describe what different kinds of intervals do in the HT's, I
think mostly in terms of plain old beat speeds and the kind of "vibrato" they
produce.  The HT's, rather than having a smooth, even and chromatic
distribution of the comma over the scale, divide it in alignment with the
cycle of 5ths.  It's not mysterious, it's not magic.  It's really no different
than the way a skilled musician is able to vary the intensity of the vibrato
to suit the music as opposed to having the very same moderate vibrato in every
tonality.  In my analysis, that is the essence of what the HT's and key color
are all about.

Bill Bremmer RPT
Madison, Wisconsin