Re: For Keenan Pepper -- "Such lips, such lettuce"

Hello, there, Keenan Pepper, and thank you for a statement where your
honesty, tact, and humor are all refreshing. You have clarified some
points about your original intentions in proposing your "Other Noble
Fifth" tuning of which I, for one, will take due note in discussing
the history of what is to me indeed a beautiful neo-Gothic tuning (or
more properly "temperament," as you point out, see below).

In music, as in the sciences, serendipity is often the name of the
game: an experiment may have unpredictable results leading in new
directions, not necessarily the ones intended by the original
experimenter. This may be an especially notable, and humorous,
example.

Please let me warmly agree that given your actual intentions in
proposing this temperament, "Keenan Pepper's neo-Gothic temperament"
is wrong; how about the rephrasing, "Keenan's Pepper's proposed 'Noble
Fifth' temperament, which happens to be a beautiful and brilliant
optimization from a neo-Gothic point of view"?

By the way, your remark that you haven't _heard_ any neo-Gothic music
reminds me that I should find or borrow a cassette recorder or the
like and tape a few improvisations and medieval compositions; my
cassette deck has been out of order for a couple of years, and it's
time to repair or replace it. Then I could send you a tape, however
"quick and unpolished," of some actual music. (This goes for you and
other Tuning List members, some with lots of experience and advice to
offer, I'd suspect.)

Your comment about "temperaments," as opposed to "tunings," leads me
to consider how inconsistent my own usage is. Strictly speaking, the
only "regular tuning" I've used so far is Pythagorean; the others,
including yours, are all "regular temperaments." Informally, however,
I often tend to use "tuning" as a generic category for everything.

Paleobiologists, for example, speak of _sensu strictu_ ("in a strict
sense") and _sensu latu_ ("in a wider or freer sense"), and maybe as a
kind of musical evolutionary throwback to the 14th century, I can
especially appreciate such distinctions.

Anyway, given your own musical agenda calling for ratios of 5 and 7,
we are much agreed that "Pepper's Noble Fifth" is _not_ an especially
likely tuning, any more than one would be likely to locate a tropical
resort in the middle of Antarctica!

Seeing the allusion to "hypermeantone" in your original "Other Noble
Fifth" post, I let myself guess that at least in a general sort of
way, you may have intended it for neo-Gothic music, the main context
on this List where "hypermeantone" has been discussed. However, as is
often true, the actual story may be more remarkable than any legend.

For someone who seeks close approximations of ratios like 14:11 or
21:17, it just happens that the 416-cent and 367-cent thirds of your
tuning are ideal, and the balance of optimizatons between 14:11 and
13:11 (or 33:28), and between 21:17 and 17:14, is quite remarkable.

When I first saw your proposal and checked out some of the intervals,
my unabashed reaction was: "I wish I had thought of this, but I'm
delighted that Keenan Pepper has." Both the idea of a temperament
serving as a "noble counterpart" to Thorwald Kornerup's, and the
wonderful _musical_ results, are indeed things of joy and beauty.

Now we know that it was serendipity, a serendipity best expressed in
actual music.

Again, I want strongly to agree with you that if your agenda calls for
ratios of 5 and 7, temperaments around 704 cents are not the likeliest
choice. As Dave Keenan has noted in his brilliant paper on regular
"chain-of-fifths" tunings, one ideal choice might be 1/4-comma
meantone or 31-tET; a more "offbeat" choice might be 22-tET, much
beloved by Paul Erlich.

http://www.uq.net.au/~zzdkeena/Music/1ChainOfFifthsTunings.htm

In theory, _any_ open tuning might approximate _any_ ratio to any
desired degee of accuracy if the tuning chain is carried far enough.
However, Dave very reasonably proposes 14 fifths or 15 notes per
octave as one line to draw.

While it may be rash to judge a book by its cover, sampling the first
15 or so notes of a tuning to get an idea of its general color and
quality seems musically quite natural to me. If those notes don't fit
a given style, then there is always the option Chaucer suggested to
his readers: "If you don't like this tale, choose another."

This isn't to exclude the very creative and ingenious tuning schemes
and keyboard mappings of someone like Graham Breed, only to say that
it isn't wrong to choose a tuning which makes the desired intervals
available in the simplest and easiest way.

If the first 15 notes interest me, then certainly I may go to an
archicembalo of 24, for example, and find additional "surprises."
However, with something like the e-based tuning I've discussed
recently (a neighbor to your "Noble Fifth" tuning near the other end
of the "704-cent" block), the first 12 or 15 notes are what attracted
me to the neighborhood; the others are a kind of bonus.

It's both amusing and maybe educational that my passion for "Keenan
Pepper's Noble Fifth tuning" should be something of an enigma to the
author of that tuning himself.

Keenan, there's an old Latin saying which might apply, and which
Thomas Morley invoked in 1597 to explain the taste of musicians given
to a style of improvisation he considered "old-fashioned" and even
crude: "Such lips, such lettuce" -- the quip of a certain M. Crassus,
on seeing a donkey eat thistles.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net