 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-06-15 14:24
The title of the thread is a joke, of course; but the subject is a serious one. As far as I can tell, intonation is not so systematically taught nowadays, particularly on wind instruments; the 'then' in the title is intended to refer to the eighteenth century, when the problem of playing in tune, and its pedagogy, was much more discussed. Prompted in part by an unsatisfactory exchange in another thread, I have dug out a fairly extensive and respectable academic literature to do with how instruments with flexible tuning have participated in performances of both eighteenth century and modern eras, with or without fixed-pitch instruments such as keyboards. Some, though not all, is listed below.
My own experience of playing in ensembles over the years has led me to a particular judgement of how best to approach the problem of playing in tune, on both modern and period instruments, and it was gratifying to find agreement with my views in much of what was written in the eighteenth century. I had expected to find more 'old codgers' spouting nonsense, but fortunately there wasn't very much of that.
The most evident old codger in this regard, indeed, turned out to be much more recent, and one of the most eminent men in the field: J. Murray Barbour, who wrote the heavily cited reference 'Tuning and Temperament, a Historical Survey' (East Lansing, Michigan, 1951). His article 'Just Intonation confuted', (Music & Letters, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Jan., 1938), pp. 48-60) I found to be the most wide of the mark.
The most comprehensive reference is:
Bruce Haynes: 'Beyond temperament: non-keyboard intonation in the 17th and 18th centuries' (Early Music, August 1991, pp. 357-382).
This article includes an appendix of fifteen pages of annotated sources dating from 1690 to 1813 with English translations, pp.367-382. The epigraph, by Georg Philip Telemann (1742), reads:
"My system is not based on any keyboard temperament, rather it displays the sounds found on unrestricted instruments like the 'cello, violin etc. that can play purely in tune."
This quote embodies the central idea of the period: that IF you can alter the pitch of the note you're playing, then you can play better in tune than if you're playing a fixed pitch instrument HOWEVER THAT INSTRUMENT IS TUNED.
Moreover, it implicitly endorses the notion that THAT sort of 'in tune' is a GOOD THING, and that adjustments in order to achieve it are to be aspired to.
Of course, if you can make these adjustments, but have to play or sing with a fixed-pitch instrument, difficulties arise, and there are a variety of solutions reported. Quantz, in his Essai d'une methode pour apprendre a jouer de la Flute Traversiere, 1752, puts the responsibility for correction on the ACCOMPANYING instrument:
"Every harpsichordist who understands the proportion of intervals will also know that minor semitones like D-D# and E-Eb, etc, differ by a comma, and therefore cause on this instrument (unless the keys are split) certain intonation problems with other instruments that play these notes in their correct proportions. This is especially noticeable when the harpsichord plays with any of these instruments in unison. Now, since these notes cannot always be avoided, especially in keys with many sharps or flats, the accompanist does well to put them in the middle or lower part of the chord, or if such a note makes a minor third, to omit it altogether. For it is especially these minor 3rds that sound so imperfect and defective when played in unison with the principal part in the upper octaves. I am referring mainly to the minor 3rds when c", d" and e" (the second-octave ut, re and mi on the flute) are preceded by a flat, or to put it more briefly, the notes cb", db" and eb" I am also referring, however, to g and a' (first-octave sol and la), and d" and e" (second octave re and mi) when preceded by a sharp, since as major 3rds, they are too wide in their temperament and therefore too high, it is true that this difference [in intonation] is not as clear when the harpsichord is played by itself, or when it accompanies a large ensemble. But when the notes are in unison with another instrument, the difference is quite audible, since the other instruments play them in their correct ratios, whereas on the harpsichord they are merely tempered. For this reason, it is better to omit them entirely, rather than offend the ear."
...and members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment currently preparing Purcell's Faerie Queen for Glyndebourne report to me that their harpsichordist, playing in 1/6 comma mean-tone temperament, follows this line.
Jean-Philippe Rameau (Generation harmomque (Paris, 1737), ed. and trans. D. Hayes (diss., Stanford U., 1974)) likewise notes the superiority of the intonation of the flexible instrument or voice -- and incidentally takes a polite sideswipe at the notion that the varying effectiveness of keyboard temperaments in different keys have anything to do with affect, except in cloud-cuckoo land:
pp.87-9: "[When a singer is accompanied by a harpsichord,] on which the temperament is the most out of tune, [the singer's ear is] continually preoccupied with the tonic of the key . . . after having passed through several [intervals] which are surely not in unison with those of the harpsichord, the voice rejoins the harpsichord on the tonic note or chord."
p.92: "The ear does not slavishly follow instrumental temperament . . . [Instruments] only serve to orientate the voice on the principal notes. . . singers correct, without thinking twice. . . anything that might obscure pure intonation in relation to the principal notes."
p.91: "the best masters [on the violin] . as I have been told by [Jean-Pierre] Guignon [1707-74], one of his Majesty's musicians, narrow the 5ths slightly, in order to sweeten the overlarge 6th . . . [between] the bottom and top strings."
p.104: "To those who believe that the different impressions they receive are caused by the difference in temperament in each transposed key, giving each a special character and thereby providing more variety, permit me to tell them that they are mistaken, variety has its origin in the blending of keys and not in the modification of intervals, which can only displease the ear, thus distracting it from its [proper] work."
What Quantz says about different sizes of semitones may well sound strange to our modern ears. But he upshot of this way of looking at the matter is to produce a scale in which the thirds in the home keys are suitably small and the fifths acceptable. As John Hind Chesnut (Mozart's Teaching of Intonation (Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Summer, 1977), pp. 254 - 271)) writes:
"Eighteenth-century writers on keyboard intonation speak primarily about the tuning of fifths and thirds, but the authorities on non-keyboard instruments we shall cite here deal primarily with the tuning of whole steps and half steps. The difference in emphasis no doubt results from the fact that non-keyboard performers, unlike keyboard players, are principally concerned with melody lines rather than with chords. Since all the intervals are interrelated in a complete tuning system, however, this difference in emphasis is of no consequence to our understanding of the systems being proposed."
The interesting thing for wind players here is that although we too are concerned with melody lines, we are often also very concerned with chords. ANY good wind section, of whatever period, understands the requirement to approximate just intonation in common chords. Note again the background assumption that we are striving to approximate something ABSOLUTE -- good intonation in and of itself:
"The type of tuning we presently call "meantone temperament" is not called a "temperament" in the eighteenth-century terminology we find here. Only the compromise tunings used at the keyboard are called "temperaments" in these sources. In fact, the writers of these sources were so unconscious of alternatives to what we call "meantone temperament" for the uncompromised tuning of non-keyboard instruments that they had no name for this system at all; they thought of what we call "meantone temperament" simply as correct intonation." [ibid]
Nowadays, in our unsystematic modern way, we don't teach large and small melodic semitiones except perhaps on baroque or classical string instruments. But we do play small thirds (and therefore 'not sharp' leading tones in cadences) in wind chords. Therefore our intonation is what we might call, 'locally just'.
Before pausing for the time being (there are further points to be made about the development of modern, so-called 'expressive' intonation as contrasted with the 'syntonic' intonation described here), we may usefully glance at J. Murray Barbour's diatribe against 'just intonation'. He thought he had a knockdown argument against the use of just intonation ["Just Intonation confuted"]:
"Paradoxically, if all the chords are made pure, the pitch of the key as a whole will probably fluctuate. On the assumption that the pitch of a repeated note remains constant in successive chords, the pitch of the key will not vary so long as the roots of chords move by fourths or by fifths; but if a root falls a minor third or rises a major third, the pitch is lowered by a comma; in the reverse progressions (root falling a major third or rising a minor third) the pitch is raised by a comma. If throughout a composition the upward tendencies are exactly balanced by the downward tendencies, the final pitch will be the same. But these tendencies seldom do balance."
Barbour's example of this was the first two bars of 'God Save the Queen':
http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/zarlino/sons/godchute.mid
However, the fallacy is exposed by noting that the assumption:
"that the pitch of a repeated note remains constant in successive chords"
...need not be made. Indeed, we ROUTINELY do not make it in a wind section. It is quite common to request that someone "play their 'A' a little sharper in THAT chord than they do in the previous one."
http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/zarlino/sons/godstabl.mid
...is one possible result.
(By the way, the whole of this website:
http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/zarlino/index.html
...is well worth a look and listen, especially the 'Little Syntonic Concert':-)
Tony
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Author: johng ★2017
Date: 2009-06-15 20:26
Thank you for the 18th century quotes and the zarlino link. I feel that most good players make some adjustments for pure intonation without thinking of it too much, but my education about this important topic was sadly lacking.
What about this, are our schools of music covering this topic these days?
John Gibson, Founder of JB Linear Music, www.music4woodwinds.com
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-06-16 07:56
Tony wrote:
<< But we do play small thirds (and therefore 'not sharp' leading tones in cadences) in wind chords. Therefore our intonation is what we might call, 'locally just'.>>
That makes sense. It seems that we would naturally make chords locally just because when we try to eliminate the non-harmonic beat frequencies (which is the natural way to adjust tuning), that's mathematically the same thing as approaching just intonation (integer ratios of frequencies).
In fact, seems like it would be really hard to try to actually play in "perfect" equal temperament on a wind or non-fretted string instrument, because that means trying to introduce just the right amount of "out-of-tune-ness" into the chord (which is hard to gauge), as opposed to approaching a locally just intonation (which is simply an effort to eliminate the physical sensation of being out of tune--the non-harmonic beats).
On the sharpening of leading tones that I mentioned in that other thread, I neglected to say that Klose (Complete Method p. 49) notes that this sharpening is something you would only want to do in a melodic solo line, where you don't have to blend with other instruments (which is consistent with the idea that chords ought to be locally just).
Thanks for the quotes/links. This is an interesting topic.
Post Edited (2009-06-16 08:00)
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Author: oliver sudden
Date: 2009-06-17 21:06
In fact, seems like it would be really hard to try to actually play in "perfect" equal temperament on a wind or non-fretted string instrument, because that means trying to introduce just the right amount of "out-of-tune-ness" into the chord (which is hard to gauge), as opposed to approaching a locally just intonation (which is simply an effort to eliminate the physical sensation of being out of tune--the non-harmonic beats).
I’m really not sure about that. We can play a dominant seventh chord in tune without flattening the seventh by 31 cents, can’t we? For that matter I suggest that we very rarely play our major thirds 14 cents smaller than equal temperament.
I don’t find it particularly difficult to hear in equal temperament. Which is a good thing: as I’ve said elsewhere, Debussy and Webern require it for their basic vocabulary to function. A whole-tone scale has to be six equal tones and an augmented triad has to divide the octave into equal major thirds (if the major thirds are just then the octave is 42 cents short!). Dodecaphonic music requires the evenness of resonance of equal temperament, otherwise you’re privileging certain intervals and the compositional fabric starts to unravel.
p.104: "To those who believe that the different impressions they receive are caused by the difference in temperament in each transposed key, giving each a special character and thereby providing more variety, permit me to tell them that they are mistaken, variety has its origin in the blending of keys and not in the modification of intervals, which can only displease the ear, thus distracting it from its [proper] work."
That's Rameau speaking, of course, who, wonderful as he is, did not for example write the Well-Tempered Clavier. (As Telemann, wonderful as he is, also did not.) There has recently emerged a very intriguing argument indeed (have a look at <www.larips.com>) that Bach included a diagrammatic representation of his desired keyboard tuning on the title page of his manuscript. Richard Egarr has recorded the first volume in this system, and as far as I’m concerned it’s an absolute revelation – every key has its own ‘taste’, and the point of writing a collection of pieces which traverse the available keys becomes self-evident. Both my ears and my dramatic sense are entirely happy in that particular “cloud-cuckoo-land” and I have a feeling that if Rameau had heard it he might have got the point.
The idea of keys having their own flavours persisted throughout the eighteenth century. Here’s the list from Schubart’s “Aesthetik der Tonkunst” (1787) - not a great translation and not actually his ordering I think but it will have to do:
* C major - Completely pure, innocence, simplicity.
* C minor - Declaration of love or the lament of unhappy love.
* D-flat major - A leering key, degenerating into grief and rapture. It cannot laugh, but it can smile; it cannot howl, but it can at least grimace.
* C-sharp minor - Penitential lamentation, intimate conversation; sighs of disappointed friendship and love.
* D major - The key of triumph, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing. Thus, the inviting symphonies, the marches, holiday songs and heaven-rejoicing choruses are set in this key.
* D minor - Melancholy womanliness, brooding.
* E-flat major - The key of love, of devotion, of intimate conversation.
* D-sharp minor - Feelings the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear breathes out of horrible D-sharp minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.
* E major - Noisy shouts of joy, laughing pleasure and not yet complete delight.
* E minor - Naïve, womanly innocent declaration of love, lament without grumbling; sighs accompanied by few tears; imminent hope of resolving in the pure happiness of C major.
* F major - Complacence and calm.
* F minor - Deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave.
* F-sharp major - Triumph over difficulty, free sigh of relief utered when hurdles are surmounted; echo of a soul which has fiercely struggled and finally conquered.
* F-sharp minor - A gloomy key: it tugs at passion as a dog biting a dress. Resentment and discontent are its language.
* G major - Everything rustic, idyllic and lyrical, every calm and satisfied passion, every tender gratitude for true friendship and faithful love,--in a word every gentle and peaceful emotion of the heart is correctly expressed by this key.
* G minor - Discontent, uneasiness, worry about a failed scheme; bad-tempered gnashing of teeth; in a word: resentment and dislike.
* A-flat major - Death, grave, judgment, eternity lie in its radius.
* A-flat minor - Grumbling, heart squeezed until it infarcts; wailing lament, difficult struggle.
* A major - This key includes declarations of innocent love, satisfaction with one’s state of affairs; hope of seeing one’s beloved again when parting; youthful cheerfulness and trust in God.
* A minor - Pious womanliness and tenderness.
* B-flat major - Cheerful love, clear conscience, hope for a better world.
* B-flat minor - A quaint creature, dressed in the garment of night, surly. Mocking God and the world; discontented with itself and with everything; preparation for suicide.
* B major - Strongly coloured, announcing wild passions, composed from the most glaring colors. Anger, rage, jealousy, fury, despair and every burden of the heart lies in its sphere.
* B minor - The key of patience, of calm awaiting one’s fate and of submission to divine dispensation.
Is he just making all this up? If so it would be rather spectacularly pointless. Or is he describing a musical reality? In the kind of temperament we know to have been in use on keyboard instruments around then, the different tonalities do indeed have different collections of intervals. What a pity it would be to erase the extraordinary drama of the world Schubart describes just for the sake of ‘playing in tune’. Look at the Mozart Fantasia in C minor: did he write all those modulations without regard for the different colours of the different tonalities? Or did he exploit them, from the gloom of the flat-key opening to the jangling of the E7 chord which he harps on at the beginning of the Allegro and back again? To a large extent it’s the different sizes of major third in the different chords available (by no means just the static, vibration-free ‘pure’ version - which I in fact find a rather spooky interval, especially in the kind of music where it doesn't belong) that make the difference.
As mere wind players we’re a little bit distant from this kind of subject – but since we do have to play with keyboards from time to time (historically tuned ones if we’re lucky) we can at least recognise that it’s there. Quantz might just have left notes out of continuo realisations if the intervals resulting from the temperament didn’t please him; that’s not an option when we’re playing Mozart.
Post Edited (2009-06-17 21:07)
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Author: soybean
Date: 2009-06-18 06:49
Very interesting topic. My friend studied the trumpet in Switzerland. They were taught in grade school to recognize which note of the triad they were playing and to flatten the major 3rd, etc to improve the sound. I believe most music strives for just intonation, whether the composer knows it or not. Wendy Carlos wrote an amazing piece of music in just intonation (created on synthesizers) called Beauty in the Beast.
~Dan
(Leblanc Bliss, Buffet R13 key of A, Yamaha 250 Bb)
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Author: Bassie
Date: 2009-06-18 12:21
All fascinating stuff!
A question: in the opinion of the knowledgeable folk hereabouts, how does all this relate to the use of 'Bb' vs. 'A' clarinet in composition / performance? I mean, these days we like to think our modern instruments have an even scale, but (a) do they really? and (b) did they always through history (presumably not)?
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Author: oliver sudden
Date: 2009-06-18 12:41
Nowadays: they pretty much do, you can use Bb and A next to each other and hardly notice. Back in the day: they very much didn't. I had a very ear-extending experience not so long ago when I went to a friend's place and tried out some of his classical instruments. Inevitably at one point one of us was noodling away on A and the other on Bb. A wonderful kaleidoscope of microtones!
The earliest piece I know of using Bb and A simultaneously is a sextet by Reicha from 1818/19 (so of course not for the 5-key Mozartian instrument but very likely Müller-system). It's for clarinets in both Bb and A, with strings (2 violins, viola, double bass). Philippe Castejon found it in the Bibliothèque National in Paris.
Reicha said: "The greatest difficulty consisted in the problem of how to combine the two clarinets differing by a semitone. It took me four days to find the necessary combinations...". And if you've seen his piano music you'll know that contrapuntal ingenuity was if anything his strong suit.
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-06-18 17:12
oliver wrote:
<<I’m really not sure about that. We can play a dominant seventh chord in tune without flattening the seventh by 31 cents, can’t we? For that matter I suggest that we very rarely play our major thirds 14 cents smaller than equal temperament.>>
Sure we can/do, but I think you're looking at this from the opposite direction from me. You are starting with perfect equal temperament tuning and then arguing that we don't "detune" our equal temperament scale when we perform.
What I'm arguing is that because just intervals have a physical basis for why they sound stable (absence of non-harmonic beats), it is easier to tune (vertically, I mean) a just interval by ear. To use equal temperament, we have to *add* instability to the interval (which we do). How close to perfectly equal temperament we get, though, depends on how much of this instability we add. But when we are *adding* instability to an interval, we don't have the nice little physical phenomenon we do with just tuning to tell us how close we are. So while we don't have to flatten our sevenths by 31 cents, most of the time we're still going to be a few cents off because we lack the clarity of aural feedback we need to adjust the pitch to spot-on equal temperament. It's small enough not to be a big deal, though.
Notice that I'm talking about vertical tuning, though (i.e., voices playing simultaneously), where the phenomenon of beats arises. Whole tone scales and 12-tone rows are horizontal constructs, so an in-tune row or scale is a completely different concept than what I'm talking about--a different dimension, actually. In fact, it's entirely possible to have locally-just vertical intervals that progress horizontally according to equal temperament. (Imagine parallel fifths in a Debussy piece, for example.)
Post Edited (2009-06-18 17:38)
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Author: oliver sudden
Date: 2009-06-18 19:13
I don't disagree at all that just intervals have a basis for their stability. I am arguing, though, that we don't always seek that static feeling in our tuning. I would maintain that when we play our major thirds small, we don't often make them as small as just intonation would require - I suspect that our ears might even want the slight amount of beating that major thirds in most temperaments have (certainly the vast majority of 'classical' music was written with the assumption of major thirds being larger than 'just'). And we're not even tempted to tune our minor sevenths to the 'just' version.
Whole tone scales and 12-tone rows are horizontal constructs
... not actually true, I'm afraid. Both are used just as much to build harmonies.
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Author: mrn
Date: 2009-06-18 21:14
oliver sudden wrote:
> Whole tone scales and 12-tone rows are horizontal
> constructs
>
> ... not actually true, I'm afraid. Both are used just as much
> to build harmonies.
You're right. I even once made a feeble attempt at writing 12-tone music where I stacked tones from the row into chords, so I really don't know why I said that! (it was more decaffeinated cacophony than dodecaphony, but that's beside the point...) The jury will disregard mrn's last remark. 
What I was really trying to get at was the point that you can move horizontally along an equal-temperament framework, but still have chords that are locally just (or that are perhaps closer to just intonation than would be equal temperament). In other words, intonation is--in a general sense--a two-dimensional concept, and it's possible to have a mix of equal temperament and just intonation in the same performance.
For example, listen to this video, particularly the part where he talks about runs in double stops--that's the sort of thing I'm talking about:
http://violinmasterclass.com/intonation_qt.php?video=int_def4&sctn=Definition
This is related, in a way, to the situation Tony was talking about where repeated notes in a succession of chords need not be played at the same frequency when the intonation is locally just.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-06-18 21:57
It shouldn't need pointing out that an appreciation of the effectiveness of Bach's own temperament -- which actually I mentioned in passing a couple of times in previous posts -- and of WTC itself, doesn't require an endorsement of the much wilder claim that more or less impure intervals are responsible for different affects of different keys. Surely anyone who seriously concerns themselves with the expression of affect recognises that as highly implausible. You don't move your audience by playing intervals systematically more or less out of tune. (The subtle USE of pitch variation in gesture is another matter, of course.)
Bach was critical himself of the 'out-of-tuneness' of instruments. Georg Andreas Sorge (1748) wrote of Silbermann's temperament, "the 4 bad triads are of a rough, wild, or, as Capellmeister Bach in Leipzig says, barbaric nature intolerable to a good ear." And in 'Bach's extraordinary temperament -- our Rosetta stone' (Lehman, Early Music, February and May 2005), we read that the predominant quality of Bach's temperament is that it sounds 'natural'.
Well, that's not surprising, is it? Bach invented it -- perhaps even found himself forced to it -- and then wrote in it, and was a genius.
I have listened to extracts from Egarr's WTC, and do indeed find the harpsichord temperament very natural. Unfortunately, I find other aspects of the performances off-putting, and these dominate my judgement.
Oliver writes, of Schubart's ridiculous list, "Is he just making all this up?" -- to which the answer is, 'yes'. (Of course, it may have been true for HIM -- just as for some people, THURSDAY has a particular colour.)
People have believed in such superficially compelling 'systems', or weird 'realities', in every century. Think of Steiner, or Swedenborg. Think of the people nowadays who wax lyrical about the extra-terrestrial origin of crop circles, or the writings of Carlos Castaneda. (I myself found 'The Teachings of Don Juan' plausible for longer than I care to admit:-)
Tony
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Author: oliver sudden
Date: 2009-06-19 09:02
Silbermann's temperament wasn't well-tempered - there's another story of Bach improvising away in A flat major (or some other 'bad key') and 'driving him from the church with his wolf howling in his ears', or words to that effect.
repeated notes in a succession of chords need not be played at the same frequency when the intonation is locally just.
That strategy might make sense if you do indeed want everything similarly 'in tune'. On the other hand I'm quite convinced that a heck of a lot of music (especially involving keyboards - but there we're talking about such things as Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, and the recitatives which propel the Bach Passions, and so on, so the music isn't what you'd call negligible) uses the different intervals of the keys in its intended temperament as part of its dramaturgy.
Have a look at the Mozart C minor fantasia (the KV475 one, you can download the score for nothing at IMSLP). In a well-tempered tuning the dissonances in the second and third bars are really quite spicy but the resolutions on to 'purer' chords much warmer. When the opening line is transposed various times it sounds different, not just lower. The resolution to G major at bar 18 is the first real area of stability. The arrival at an F# major chord is tense and unstable, but when it melts into a much more consonant D major at bar 26 that's an effect which on an equally-tempered keyboard is completely lost. The Andantino is gorgeously consonant after what has come before it and the effect is reinforced by the temperament.
The interrupted cadences near the end (in the third-last and fourth-last bars) are a particularly interesting moment: in equal temperament (or in 'locally just' intonation, if you had a keyboard that could do it) the movement would be from one stable consonance to another. In a well-tempered tuning the Ab major chord is much less stable so the colour of the progression is completely different: it's one last stab of relative dissonance rather than just another major triad.
If you have a keyboard that can do well-tempered, have a bash through it and see - don't take my word for it. Or have a listen to Andreas Staier's Harmonia Mundi recording - it's all there. (Fortunately some of the younger codgers are taking an interest in this sort of stuff.)
Oliver writes, of Schubart's ridiculous list, "Is he just making all this up?" -- to which the answer is, 'yes'.
![[right]](http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/smileys/smilie8.gif)
Well, that's a great basis for discussion isn't it?
Three other lists from people who were presumably also making it all up, then:
* C: Vogler 1779: Pure; Schubart 1787: Pure, innocent, simple, naïve; Knecht 1792: Cheerful, pure; Galeazzi 1796: Grandiose, military, serious, majestic
* G: Vogler 1779: Naïve, innocent, rustic pleasure; Schubart 1787: Rustic, idyllic, calm, tender, love; Knecht 1792: Pleasant, rustic; Galeazzi 1796: Innocent, simple, indifferent
* D: Vogler 1779: Enlivening, heroic, impudent; Schubart 1787: Triumph, rejoicing, war-cries, marches; Knecht 1792: Pompous, noisy; Galeazzi 1796: Cheerful, gay, tumultuous, fests
* A: Vogler 1779: Sharp, amorous, tender passion; Schubart 1787: Love, satisfaction, hope, cheerfulness; Knecht 1792: Cheerful, bright; Galeazzi 1796: Harmonious, cheerful, affectionate, playful
* E: Vogler 1779: Fiery, piercing flames; Schubart 1787: Noisy shouts of joy, laughing pleasure; Knecht 1792: Wild, fiery; Galeazzi 1796: Piercing, shrill, youthful, harsh
* B: Vogler 1779: None listed; Schubart 1787: Strong, wild passions, glaring colours, despair; Knecht 1792: None listed; Galeazzi 1796: Harsh, piercing, cries of despair
* F: Vogler 1779: Dead calm; Schubart 1787: Complaisance, calm; Knecht 1792: Gentle, calm; Galeazzi 1796: Majestic, shrill
* B-flat: Vogler 1779: Twilight; Schubart 1787: Cheerful love, hope; Knecht 1792: Lovely, tender; Galeazzi 1796: Tender, soft, sweet, love, grace, charm
* E-flat: Vogler 1779: Night; Schubart 1787: Love, devotion; Knecht 1792: Splendid, solemn; Galeazzi 1796: Heroic, majestic
* A-flat: Vogler 1779: Plutonian realm (?); Schubart 1787: The grave, death; Knecht 1792: Black, night; Galeazzi 1796: Gloomy, low, deep
* D-flat: Vogler 1779: None listed; Schubart 1787: Degenerate, unusual feelings; Knecht 1792: None listed; Galeazzi 1796: None listed
* G-flat: Vogler 1779: None listed; Schubart 1787: Triumphant after fierce struggles; Knecht 1792: None listed; Galeazzi 1796: None listed
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-06-19 10:57
The fundamental issue is, do you want divergencies from what is consonant to the ear dictated:
(a) by a rigid system of some sort, or
(b) by performer choice?
For a keyboard player, (a) is forced. You have to choose a system.
You then have a great work like WTC written with a particular temperament in mind, and therefore arguably written to take advantage of the quirks of Bach's own temperament in extreme keys. I didn't particularly notice that in the Egarr extracts I heard; perhaps further acquaintance would make it evident.
Unfortunately I'm reluctant to expose myself to the OTHER affective distortions (I suppose he intends them to be affective -- affectED would be the word I'd choose) he introduces. Staier may be better, I'll have a look.
It's also possible that other works by other composers would benefit, relative to equal temperament -- that's likely, because after all, the choice of any temperament over equal temperament is precisely in order to make a keyboard instrument BETTER IN TUNE than equal temperament in some keys. However, whether these OTHER works benefit from the effect of the temperament in the less satisfactory keys is obviously to be decided by a listener.
And, that judgement would obviously require the listener to set the pleasing quality of isolated local effects, accidental or not, against the unavoidable general uncomfortableness.
Still, it would interest me to hear other keyboard works knowingly in Bach's temperament, because it's said that that temperament WORKS VERY WELL -- even in extreme keys. (The capitalisation is intended to remind readers that there is always the assumed absolute background of 'well-in-tune' to all of this.)
I don't think of people who might produce such performances as 'young codgers' at all. Good luck to them, and may their CDs be low-priced so I can buy them easily. It would please me even more if the version of Bach's temperament they chose were to be tailored to the key of the work -- that's not possible for the WTC, but is routine for tuners in less wide-ranging tonalities.
However, for an instrument that has real-time control over pitch, (a) above is NOT forced. The question then is, do we allow instrument quirks, either of our own instrument or of accompanying instrument, to force (a)? Was that what was expected in the period? I have suggested, with chapter and verse, that the overwhelming evidence is that it was not, and that even if there were evidence that some players did, I would dismiss them as uninteresting.
I remember one wind player, in the early days of period performance in the UK, criticising someone who worked hard to eliminate unevenness in his playing. "He thinks that EVEN scales are more interesting than UNEVEN scales," she sneered.
CHOICE is the crucial issue. If Bach showed his genius in keys where his temperament was less pure -- I hope to hear evidence that he did -- it lay in his choice of compositional patterns that made the impurities SEEM MEANINGFUL in context.
Therefore, we non-keyboard performers have (b), and all the subtlety that goes with it. (I'd say that included, by the way, Eartha Kitt's brilliant singing of an ENTIRE SONG extremely sharp; though obviously this belongs to a later period, it occurs in a quite simple tonal framework.)
Oliver wrote:
>> Well, that's a great basis for discussion, isn't it? >>
...in response to my assertion that Schubart was 'just making it all up'. (I'll throw in the others he mentions too:-)
You see, discussion of the matter isn't possible. You either believe it or you don't. As a performer and as a listener, everything I know about musical affect leads me to suppose that it lives in much more subtle, relational things -- some compositional, some performing, some a sort of synergy between these. The idea that it lives in a collection of larger and smaller intervals, taken across the board, in all those different temperaments, just doesn't wash.
Tony
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Author: oliver sudden
Date: 2009-06-19 16:36
It would please me even more if the version of Bach's temperament they chose were to be tailored to the key of the work -- that's not possible for the WTC
...that's putting it mildly: it would run completely against the intention of the piece!
There's one clear fact in any case: _every_ change in tuning systems on fixed-pitch instruments in the history of classical music up to equal temperament has been away from the availability of pure intervals (of course, harmonic-series major thirds especially) and towards the availability of more tonal areas.
So what simply doesn't stand up is the idea of pure consonances (major thirds especially...) as some kind of aural absolute - every historical change in temperament moved away from them. (As I understand it, Bach told Kirnberger not to tune any pure major thirds.) Keyboards didn't lessen in importance to classical music during that period, either - rather, the exact opposite. What that has to say to wind players is obviously a complex matter; but the one thing it clearly speaks against is simply falling back on pure intervals.
What you call 'impurities' are as far as I'm concerned an essential part of the palette of Baroque and Classical music. I suspect that's our main difference here. Not to be confused with the laziness you describe...
"He thinks that EVEN scales are more interesting than UNEVEN scales," she sneered.
...just an acknowledgement of the reality of the different tuning systems which form part of the complex harmonic fabric of this music. Especially the variety of consonance that contributes to its drama, its Affekt. It's not just me saying it (well, _here_ it is) - it's become an essential part of historical performance practice. It's easy to say 'just play in tune' - the reality is much more complex and much more interesting.
The idea that it lives in a collection of larger and smaller intervals, taken across the board, in all those different temperaments, just doesn't wash.
Not only, but also. It's part of the picture.
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2009-06-19 17:12
Quote:
There's one clear fact in any case: _every_ change in tuning systems on fixed-pitch instruments in the history of classical music up to equal temperament has been away from the availability of pure intervals (of course, harmonic-series major thirds especially) and towards the availability of more tonal areas.
That's disingenuous; the truth is more the other way round. The moves have been towards the availability of more tonal areas, with the unfortunate concomitant loss of pure intervals in keyboard music. It's a loss we don't have to suffer on non-keyboard instruments.
Quote:
So what simply doesn't stand up is the idea of pure consonances (major thirds especially...) as some kind of aural absolute - every historical change in temperament moved away from them.
The aural absolutes are part of our ear/brain systems. That's not changed by the history of temperament.
Quote:
What you call 'impurities' are as far as I'm concerned an essential part of the palette of Baroque and Classical music....It's not just me saying it (well, _here_ it is) - it's become an essential part of historical performance practice. It's easy to say 'just play in tune' - the reality is much more complex and much more interesting.
What you'll find if you become a professional clarinet player, in either a modern or a period context, is that you will be required to play 'in tune', because not playing in tune on a wind instrument sounds merely incompetent. If you refuse, you just won't be employed. And rightly so, in my view.
Tony
Post Edited (2009-06-19 21:42)
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Author: soybean
Date: 2009-06-19 21:42
quote: "I don't disagree at all that just intervals have a basis for their stability. I am arguing, though, that we don't always seek that static feeling in our tuning."
That's interesting. If we don't always seek that static feeling, couldn't that simply be conditioning from hearing so much keyboard music?
quote: "certainly the vast majority of 'classical' music was written with the assumption of major thirds being larger than 'just'."
Yes, but that was more a matter of practicality than preference.
~Dan
(Leblanc Bliss, Buffet R13 key of A, Yamaha 250 Bb)
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