even tone?

[Michael Jorgensen]

Hi Allen,
     Thank you for your post.  I hope the discussion resulting from my
post did not set off bombs and that they're aren't some posts i needed
to respond to.  Last weekend, unbeknownst to me, our computer staff
upgraded us to Netscape 4.5. When they did this, they forwarded my
incoming messages to server for storage, which accidentally doesn't
exist.  My messages dwell in unknown cyberland, but they may get them
back but it will likely be too late to respond.
    I too am an amateur composer.  One of the things I learned in
college was that working at the piano tends to result in doing the same
things over and over and thinking along the same modes.  It is the
affect of the finger mechanical side as opposed to the creative side. 
However, when composing in unequal temperaments, especially radically
unequal ones, this problem does not seem to occur.  I've also found this
in improvisation, which is an area I am working in  right now.  
Just thoughts,
-Mike     

Allen Wright wrote:
> 
> Mike:
> 
> Sorry for my slow response to your thoughtful reply to my posting - I've
> been out of town for a few days. Your original posting seems to have
> generated a very interesting thread on the topics of ht's, old/new pianos,
> and how composers have responded to different instruments.
> 
> I'm personally a big fan of and very interested in old pianos and
> reproductions of old pianos (we have several of both here at Oberlin, and a
> faculty member -David Breitman - who's very engaged in and well-versed in
> the subject. It's very clear to me now (as it wasn't before I worked with
> fpo's and players) how pianists interpretations of music have to change in
> pretty fundamental ways depending on the instrument at hand. I love to hear
> earlier music played on early instruments. Obviously everyone's listening
> context is being broadened, and I hope it continues to be. I say let's have
> a wider variety of pianos! (Del, modern manufacturers, and the hard-working
> builders of early instruments out there would agree with that, I'm sure).
> 
> And let's also have more temperaments, if people want them and ask for them.
> I've been surprised that the early music people I encounter here seem to be
> only interested in their one or two favorite temperaments, even though now
> that I have the Reyburn Cybertuner program I can easily offer them scads of
> different choices even though I'm not an expert in historical temperaments
> per se.
> 
> Creativity is a funny thing to pin down or make predictive generalizations
> about, and impossible to quantify. It would seem to me that composers would
> write DIFFERENTLY with a different tuning - that seems obvious enough. I'd
> have trouble believing that a composer would by definition not be able to
> write as well because he/she was "restricted" to equal temperament, though.
> Having done some amateur composing myself over the years I know that an
> important part of the process involves eliminating 99.9% of the infinitude
> of possibilities that exist on the blank page. Stravinsky even made a remark
> about that once that I can't remember exactly, but was something about
> knowing what not to put down on the page, having too many possibilites. So,
> being restricted to simpler means is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact,
> someone else here made a similar point (although with different intent) when
> they said that the composer is "forced to be creative by the fact that
> certain intervals aren't available for use in ht's" or words to that effect.
> 
> I'm glad people are talking about all this.
> 
> Regards,   Allen Wright