Re: Congralutions to John deLaubenfels

Hello, there, John deLaubenfels and everyone.

Mainly I want warmly to congratulate you, John, on your recent
adaptive tuning arrangements and on people's responses. It's very
exciting to see such a promising technique developed in good part
through this Tuning List, and also to see how critical response can
become more and more favorable as a new technique matures.

Just as in computer programming there are proverbially no nontrivial
programs without bugs, so in music and tuning, trying any new method
inevitably involves "glitches," "infelicities," and results which may
not only illustrate the limitations of first attempts but point the
way to next developments. The "adaptive tuning" saga so far may
nicely illustrate these points.

Although I don't have the technical means I suspect may be required to
process your files, and also the music might be a bit "modern" for me
to judge <grin>, I am getting a great vicarious thrill hearing the
critical response of people like Paul Erlich. When he said that your
setting sounded like it was played on a fixed-pitch instrument, that
was _really_ exciting!

As far as the question of a base tuning -- 12-tone equal temperament
(12-tet), or 31-tet, or something else -- I would be much inclined to
follow the approach you outlined in a recent post: see what tuning
makes most musical sense for a given composition. This is also Mark
Lindley's method for deciding whether an early 16th-century lute
piece, for example, might be best in Pythagorean, meantone, or 12-tet,
all possible tunings in that era before 12-tet was "standardized" for
the instrument maybe around the 1540's.

I'm tempted to add that your arrangements might sound considerably
_smoother_ than my idea of 16th-century 5-limit JI on a fixed keyboard
-- or actually _two_ such keyboards -- using a 15-note tuning based on
Zarlino's JI keyboard layout with G-D just on one keyboard and D-A on
the other. (Zarlino uses split keys rather than two manuals, but the
intervals should be the same.)

Anyway, for pieces where diesis distinctions (e.g. G#/Ab) seem a
feature rather than a bug, I would agree that your proposal for 31-tet
is a very nice choice: it's documented by Lemme Rossi in 1666, and is
close enough to circulating meantone 31 (1/4-comma) to be just about
equivalent for earlier Renaissance and Manneristic music also, if your
experiments at some point run in that direction. The precise
mathematical symmetry of 31-tet might make things a bit simpler, and
if you follow the "not-quite-precisely-just-consonances" approach
sometimes advocated here, the slight difference between a 31-tet major
third and a pure 5:4 might also be at least as much a feature as a
compromise.

While I'm hesitant to make any proposals which might maybe be detours
on your "road to Parnassus" which you are negotiating very
successfully as is, I wonder about the possibility for some 18th-19th
century music of a base scale based on an unequal 12-tone (or larger,
as Paul Erlich has mentioned in a different context) well-temperament,
for example.

The idea that occurred to me as that maybe vertical intervals in all
transpositions could be equally consonant, but melodic steps or
adjustments might somehow vary to give a certain kind of "key color."
Again, this raises the question of whether such variations (originally
in vertical tension, also) are a positive feature of the music, at
least for some composers, or for other composers or pieces more of a
concession to the exigencies of fixed tuning.

This last question can be a very elusive one: if Werckmeister or Bach
could have somehow come up with a keyboard with pure fifths and thirds
everywhere, would they have embraced it -- or have found it too
"bland" compared to the variety of tension in a usual
well-temperament?

Sometimes this question of intentions can be an elusive one. When I
see a spelled-out diminished fourth in a vocal or keyboard composition
of the 16th century (e.g. G#-C, usually between two upper parts), I
tend to read it as a deliberate choice for something not too far from
32:25 (~427 cents), or at any rate an interval in meantone or some
vocal approximation of 5-limit JI quite different from a usual major
third.

Thus I may not be especially pleased when I read a music history from
40 years or so back taking a 16th-century composition with various
neat diminished or augmented intervals of this kind and proposing that
the notation should be interpreted by rewriting it as if this were
12-tet, so that G#-C were just a "fancy" way of asking for Ab-C.

For the 18th century, however, and also for 16th-century lute music
and at least some 17th-century keyboard music (Froberger, maybe some
Frescobaldi), questions can get a lot more complicated. For the lute,
by around 1545 or 1550, 12-tet seems standard, and we know from two
theorists of very different bents, the radical Vincenzo Galilei and
the conservative Artusi, that the equivalent of diminished fourths and
sevenths on lute to regular major thirds and sixths was a feature
noted and exploited by composers.

From a philosophical point of view, maybe I'd prefer to speak not of
"pain" but of "stress" in considering either vertical or melodic
deviations from some ideal of interval size or scale symmetry, etc.

Thus while I might describe a tuning such as 1/4-comma meantone as not
in any usual sense "painful" for Renaissance music, I would
nevertheless recognize that the tempering of the fifths, for example,
involves a degree of "stress" -- some stress possibly being a usual
norm in music as in life.

We have evidence that in the 16th century this stress was generally
taken for granted, but also that some attempts to remove it by the use
of classic or adaptive JI keyboards (e.g. Zarlino's classic 5-limit
scheme and Vicentino's 38-note adaptive scheme) were regarded as
striking enough in effect to merit some technical complications, even
if mainly on an experimental basis.

However, these historical musings quite aside, "nothing succeeds like
success." Maybe what you've done is something like my approach of
realizing early music on synthesizer -- but in some ways more
challenging, because you are devising new aesthetic algorithms, as it
were, and dealing with very delicate parameters of melody and
verticality.

Having added these odd remarks, I want again to congratulate you on
the latest results, and also for your patience as well as creativity
in reaching them.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mscnulter@value.net