Re: [Harp-L] more on temperament and such

[icemanle@xxxxxxx]

Before equal temperament, music played on or with keyboard accompaniment was not able to modulate into all 12 keys. Up until the Baroque period of music, music did not modulate much. It was the general evolution of an art form that lead to new ideas - music that modulated.
 
Before equal temperament, the excess number of cents (which, if you tune one octave using only "pure" intervals leaves you with 24 cents left over) was usually divided in half and applied to two notes far removed from the tonic. For instance, you could play in all but two keys and it would sound wonderful and warm. There are other historical tunings that take the excess 24 cents and place it in other areas of the octave.
 
When music evolved to the point that it wanted to include these last two key possibilities, the ET system was developed, dividing the 24 cents by 12 (notes to the octave), and the extra 2 cents/note was subtracted from the pure interval - so, in a PURE sense, every note in the octave is tuned imperfectly flat except for the reference tone.
 
If you sing without piano accompaniment or play violin without keyboard accompaniment, you will naturally play/sing all your intervals purely. It is only with keyboard accompaniment that a subtle change is made (either consciously or unconsciously) to alter the notes played/sung to match the piano.
 
Bach's Well Tempered Klavier was a set of exercise pieces created to take advantage of this new development of ET - the pianist was now totally free to allow the music of one composition to flow into every possible key offered.
 
With harmonica, you can relate to this general concept through the Golden Melody tuning versus the pre-war blues harmonica type tuning. In one tuning, every note sounds at good pitch, but the chords sound harsh. In blues tuning, the chords and 2/5 inhale splits sound warm and wonderful, however the (for instance) 5 hole inhale sounds flat all by itself when played against chords.
 
The Iceman

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan R. Ross <jross38@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 23:20:03 -0400
Subject: [Harp-L] more on temperament and such


>Bach liked equal tuning well enough. Check out the well tempered
clavier >for
>some astounding music.

There is a lot of debate about what temperament(s) Bach actually used.
There is no direct evidence of his preferences in this regard, but a
fair amount of speculation (do a search and you'll see that I'm
understating it with the phrase "fair amount").  Bach certainly knew of
equal temperament, but he also knew of the various _well_ temperaments
which are inherently unequal in nature.  Some argue that the title of
the work in question actually hints that he was arguing in favor of
well-temperament over ET--I'm not sure I'd go that far.