TUNING digest 897

Re: Alves on the piano. Owen Jorgensen has demonstrated how variable
actual piano tunings are; his most recent book - someone on the list should
have the exact reference, I am without most of my library - suggesting that
through the nineteenth century and well into our own, twelfth root of two
tuning has been the accidental exception and not the rule and that a lot of
western repertoire ought to be reconsidered in this light. Late nineteenth
century music is much more interesting intonationally than is usually
assumed!

I recommend listening to a historical instrument recording of the Brahms
Horn Trio (the Hermann Baumann recording is excellent): the combination of
violin, valveless horn, and piano is a vivid demonstration of intonational
variety and techniques for compromise in performance by instruments with
radically different intonational structures. The New Grove article on the
horn has a chart for valveless horn in a (meantone?) tuning where sharps
and flats are clearly dinstinct pitches; classical violin technique has
decided Pythagorean tendencies; a good piano tuner would preseumably have
been expected to have this in mind in tuning before a concert. Even today,
at Hessischer Rundfunk and other radio stations in Germany, the piano tuner
will ask the conductor or pianist before the concert about what keys
(tonalities) will be played. And the best tuners here continue to work
without the stroboscope. Clearly, equal temperament is part of the model
for tuning, but other considerations define the exact nature of the
particular temperament.

The main affect of the late nineteenth century piano is that one need not
tune so often because the more rigid wires and heavier pin block and
general structure hold the the tuning better against both changes in the
weather and frequent playing. That this reduction in frequency of tunings
may have led to a demand for a more all-purpose brand of tuning is
possible, but unlikely, in that composers would have been among those most
frequently receiving new tunings. It is striking to note, in this regard
that three of the most prominent composers associated with the sins of
12tet (Berlioz, Wagner, Schoenberg) were not pianists, and composed away
from the keyboard.

Members of the Gamelan list have made many similar reference to the ways in
which the instruments without fixed intonation and voices vary from the
tuning of the fixed pitch instruments; I have also observed this in
mainland Southeastasian musics.

Daniel Wolf

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Date: Sat, 16 Nov 1996 16:47:27 -0800
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