lutes and tunings.

Greetings:
Neil writes:
> As mentioned, we know Bach loved the Lute, and was known to have >jammed
with S.L. Weiss...thus, was Bach
>in well temperament, and Weiss in eq?
> would it
>have been possible for Bach (and other keyboardists of that day) to >have
tuned to eq by ear, using the notes of the Lute?
I would think it difficult. Try this, from one guitar, tuned as well as
possible, tune another guitar by open string unison tuning, one string at a
time, and then see if the second guitar sounds as good as the first. Now
imagine trying to copy a temperament from a lute to a harpsichord. I tried
this once, ( with two Martin D-18's, the tuning didn't make it from one to
the other intact).
It appears from Jorgensen that temperament transfer like this was
attempted, and was found to be a crude way of temperament. The differences
between wire and gut would have made the overtone alignment difficult, perhaps
that may have been a reason for the Lautenwerk? I dunno, maybe someone older
and smarter can answer this??
I would think the lutist would have tuned to the keyboard tuning, but I
know little about lutes, other than they were among the first to benifit from
the Mersenne ratios and Napier's logarithms. The moveable frets on them makes
me think they were multi-intonation capable, and I would assume a lutist of
the time would move one or two of them to match the ensemble of the moment.
But I don't know chestnuts from pecans about this........

>In a similar vein, were the instru-mentalists of that time adept at
>switching between various systems? If
> a flutist, for example, played with a Lutenist, seems eq would be the
>system...but, would they be using well or meantone with others, such
>as keyboard players?
Was there a ET flute in the 1700's? I thought that was more of an early
to mid 1800's development. Keyboard tuning was considered to suffer the
"imperfection of the instrument", and I would think it would determine the
keys that the other instruments would tune for.
I can't claim expertise on other instruments history through this era, but
if we could get Maclaren back in here, I bet we would all hear a lot about
this. Others??
Regards,
Ed Foote


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From: Paul Rapoport
Subject: useless temperaments
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