more on the piano / how about?

Two Items:

(1) Anyone who has spent time playing early (western) keyboard music in
historical tunings has heard that the intervals and tonalities furthest
from just in intonation often take on a structural role in compositions. It
is vivid to hear the point of furthest harmonic remove in the development
of a classical sonata when this is also the least well tuned portion of the
keyboard. Of course, music through 1812 or so is normally composed with a
closer homology between keyboard tuning and harmonic structure than later
music, but the landmark works of late romanticism (i.e. after Chopin) are
almost exclusively orchestral. (And the best late romantic literature for
the piano was written for instruments with Viennese construction, which
have a much lighter frame). My reading of Jorgenson is quite different in
that I take _Victorian Tunings_ to be an indication of the continued
inability/undesireability to get 12tet exactly. These tuning coincide with
the earliest accurate measurements of actual tunings, which show clearly
the appreciable deviations from 12tet. Moreover, there is a
well-established sense of key characteristics that is not explainable on
the basis of pitch height - which varied considerably - but must be
explained largely on the basis of intonation. (I distinguish these key
characteristics from the pitch characteristics used by Skryabin and Hauer
in the 20th century - which are solely based on pitch height).

(2) It would be a great service to the tuning community at large if someone
were able to take a frequency counter into a WestLAMusic / Sam Ash sort of
store (or better yet, to a music trade fair) and actually measure the
tuning resolution of commercially available instruments and digital tuners.
I would do it here, but German music store owners tend to be unfriendly
about questions _already answered_ in the handbooks.

Daniel Wolf

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