FWD: Bach's Tuning

On Fri, 22 Sep 1995, Aleksander Frosztega wrote:
>It is dangerous to cite Kirnberger as a paradigm of J.S. Bach's compositional
>practice; it is even more dangerous to cite Kirnberger's thoughts on
>temperament as being those of J.S. Bach's.

And it is yet _more_ dangerous to take Marpurg's spin on Kirnberger's
statements as being those of Bach. See below.

> Kirnberger's temperaments
>(there are 5 altogether) were attempts to reconcile just intonation with free
>modulation.

Er--isn't this what _all_ temperaments are?

> The most famous of Kirnberger's temperaments is what we call
>"Kirnberger II." This temperament is a modified multi-linear temperament. As
>pointed out by Prof. Rasch, Kirnberger admitted several times to Marpurg that
>Bach tuned each one of his fifths a bit flat. This outright eliminates all
>forms of multi-linear temperaments, which have (several) rows of just fifths
>connected by just conduit intervals (principally the ditone). [snip]

The passage in question would seem to be this (Rasch quoting Marpurg):
:Several times Kirnberger himself told me and others how the famous J.S.
:Bach (during the time of the former's musical instruction under the
:latter) made over to him the tuning of his keyboard, and how that master
:expressly desired him to make all major thirds sharp. In a tuning with
:all major thirds sharp, no pure major third can occur, but as soon as no
:pure major thirds are found, so too no major third can be found [which
:is] a comma (81/80) sharp. J.S. Bach, whose hearing was not impaired by
:bad arithmetic, must have heard that a major third a comma sharp is a
:disgusting interval. Why else did he entitle his collection of preludes
:and fugues in all twenty-four keys the Art of Temperament?

The problem with this is that Marpurg is simply wrong. A temperament
with all major thirds sharper than pure (which is _all_ that we really
know about Bach's tuning from evidence like this) is by no means
required to have all fifths flat; that is a much, much stricter
requirement. It is triviality itself to think of lots of tunings in
which all thirds are wide but many fifths are just. Barnes, Vallotti,
Werckmeister III, and any number of Neidhardt's tunings all fulfill
these conditions, just to start with.

If you know of any documents in which Kirnberger himself, not filtered
through his rhetorical adversary Marpurg, admits that Bach tuned all
fifths flat, please cite it.

--pH (manynote@library.wustl.edu or http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote)
O
/\ "Do you like to gamble, Eddie?
-\-\-- o Gamble money on pool games?"

P.S. to tuning list: Oh no, it's the 81/64 flamewar! Goes back longer
than we realized. 8-)>

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