RE: TUNING digest 1371

Bill Alves wrote:

>Handel's 16-key organ was the exception, not the rule, and the vast
>majority of meantone keyboards had 12 keys. Thus musicians had to decide
>whether to tune a given tritone to an augmented fourth or diminished
fifth,
>and so they might encounter music where they had to play a Db when they
had
>tuned an C#. Thus enharmonics, while theoretically distinct, had to be
>treated as the same for practical purposes on most keyboards.

Of course, the musicians did not think about tritones at all when tuning.
What they had to decide was whether the key in question would sound a C#
or a Db. If they had tuned it to C# and needed a Db, well, then it was
time to retune. No one wrote a C# and Db in the same piece (except for
that unique John Bull fantasia discussed earlier), and collections of
pieces were arranged by key precisely to facilitate their performance on
the usual keyboard. Those who got tired of retuning for the more common
alternatives of D#/Eb and G#/Ab obtained an instrument with a 14-note
keyboard, which was fairly common. Handel just went farther than most -
his organ was not an exception _in principle_.

Gordon Collins
gordon_collins@jhuapl.edu