Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Bach tuning wohltemperirt

Paul Erlich schrieb:
> --- In tuning@y..., ha.kellner@t... wrote:
> > Dear Participants,
> > I am pleased to be member and invite you to look into my site:
> > http://ha.kellner.bei.t-online.de
> > Herbert Anton Kellner
>
> Hi Herbert. Welcome to this list! Your claim to have found "the" Bach
> temperament will create some controversy (well, it already has, since
> you're famous). Johnny Reinhard is sure it is Werckmeister. Barnes,
> van Eck, and others have come to various other conclusions. Perhaps
> you'd care to discuss the _evidence_ behind your deduction that this
> is the temperament Bach intended?
>
> Thanks,
> Paul
>Dear Mr. Erlich,

The reply to your query about "evidence" for authenticity - and this as
exhaustively as possible, and to the best of my knowledge - is held in the 40 or
so publications that are referred to in my site.

For about 250 years the E. T.-rubbish had been irresponsibly and
incompetently disseminated and propagated. For baroque harpsichord music, the
sound of E. T. is a disaster, an insult to hearing ears.
It is not possible, besides basing myself upon my publications, to present the
material of 40 articles within 3 lines.

I have known my regretted friend John Barnes for about 30 years. He let read me
porior to publication his deservedly famous text for comments - I had none! I
just said to him, do publish it ASAP. Within his error margins, our results are
entirely compatible.

In my review of Rasch's facsimile of Werckmeisters Musicalische Temperatur, I
have demonstrated that Werckmeister himself knew "Bach's" wohltemperirt - this
was, in fact, Werckmeister's preferred system.

No reasonable person would - could there be any sufficient reason - close C-E by
three tempered plus 1 perfect fifth!! My article in ACUSTICA also tackles this
aspect.

That is to say, Werckmeister didn't take himself his system W III seriously!!
I published about 4 papers in the English Harpsichord Magazine which, above all,
elucidated my own comprehension of Werckmeister's psychology. The proponent of W
III for Bach should read that paper, published 1985 in Revue de Musicologie,
Paris. I'm certain he does not know it, but I leave happily everybody with his
preconceived ideas, be they wrong, but makes and leaves them happy.

Baroque minds, JSB included, differ from ours, nowadays. Refer to Rolf Dammann,
Der Musikbegriff im Deutschen Barock.

A convenient and hopefully easily accessible paper I published in THE TRACKER,
Organ Historical Society which I heartily recommend. In my personal opinion, I
was pretty surprised how readable it came out. I'm even close to admire that
article myself, were I not so modest by nature!

Kindest regards,

Yours sincerely,
Herbert Anton Kellner
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>

Hello, there, Herbert Kellner, and please let me join others in
welcoming you to our Alternate Tuning List.

Both in the early 18th century in Western Europe, and in the early
21st century in various parts of the world connected by this List,
views on music and intonation may vary considerably.

For example, Joe Monzo has suggested that his 21st-century perspective
may differ somewhat from Bach's because of such influences as the
later 18th-19th century development of the sonata form.

Certainly my 21st-century perspective may differ from that of Bach and
his era because my own musical and intonational practice is influenced
by 13th-14th century European elements not part of the standard
"musical worldview" of the early 18th century in the same geographical
area.

For example, there was in fact an "Academy of Ancient Music" in London
during the middle 18th century, but "ancient" in this context meant
for the most part the 16th-century tradition, not earlier Gothic
music.

If medieval Pythagorean intonation and polyphonic style would have
seemed "strange" from the kind of 18th-century perspective we are
discussing, still more so might have been temperaments in which _all_
fifths are wider than a pure 3:2, or in which cadential semitones of
around 55 cents are common.

Here I might add that an early 21st-century musician oriented mainly
to Javanese or Balinese gamelan or Japanese koto music or the
traditional vocal polyphony of Georgia could likely offer a viewpoint
different from Joe Monzo's, yours, Bach's, or mine.

What I want to emphasize strongly is that there is not necessarily any
consensus on these issues in 2001, and we need not suppose that there
was necessarily any such consensus among Bach and his musical circle
around 1722 either.

Having said this, I would offer as a hypothesis that an unequal
12-note well-temperament of some kind seems a likely historical choice
for Bach's keyboard music, just as some variety of meantone seems an
obvious choice for 16th-century music.

However, this leaves upon the question: "Just what shading of
well-temperament for Bach's era, or meantone for Gabrieli's, say?"

Here I would suggest that it is a matter of opinion and taste, and
that the diversity of tunings documented in each era leaves us room
for more than one definitive answer.

For example, I often like either 1/4-comma or 2/7-comma meantone for
16th-century pieces. However, one harpsichordist, Joseph Spencer, has
reported often leaning toward 1/3-comma as a more dramatically
tempered arrangement -- and we know that Costeley (1570) liked this
"thirdtone" tuning, or the almost identical division of the octave
into 19 equal parts.

Zarlino adopts 2/7-comma as his own tuning, indeed the first such
meantone tuning to be described in terms of a precise fraction of the
syntonic comma (1558), and later comments that 1/4-comma is not
difficult to tune while 1/3-comma is somewhat "languid."

However, I might question any attempt to identify one of these tunings
as _the_ "Lasso tuning" or "Cabezon tuning" or "Gabrieli tuning,"
although in the last case one could argue that Zarlino's influence in
Venice _might_ have made 2/7-comma a likely choice.

What one person sees as a "flaw" in Werckmeister III, another might
see as a virtue: "more dramatic shadings," for example. The major
third C-E might be further from 5:4 than in some other
well-temperaments of the era, but then again, it might also be
described as somewhat closer to pure than in 1/6-comma meantone,
Silbermann's famous organ tuning during the same era.

Going back my 16th-century analogy, I might also ask, "Is it not
possible to prefer slightly different temperaments for different
pieces?"

For example, Mark Lindley finds 2/7-comma meantone especially pleasing
for some of Gabrieli's pieces featuring mostly slow-moving vertical
sonorities; more contrapuntal textures suggest to him a less heavily
tempered meantone (e.g. 1/4-comma) with somewhat narrower diatonic
semitones.

Similarly, I find the hypothesis attractive that Bach may have played
on keyboards with a range of well-temperaments, with Werckmeister III
at one part of the spectrum and something like Victorian "shades of
equal temperament" at another -- that is, temperaments with gentle
color contrasts which might be deemed _relatively_ equal by comparison
to other typical schemes.

However, this is reasoning by analogy, not by an appreciation of the
fine structure of Bach's music which someone like Wendy Carlos could
offer, for example, or Daniel Wolf, and which many people here are
likely much better qualified to offer than I am.

My main point would be that a period may have an outlook on intonation
suggesting a general approach -- meantone in the 16th century, or
unequal well-temperaments in the 18th -- but leaving a range of
tunings open which follow this approach, inviting then or now the
exercise of taste and creative choice, often an exercise with much
room for divergence.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net

Bach tuning wohltemperirt

🔗ha.kellner@t-online.de

🔗Paul Erlich <paul@stretch-music.com>

🔗ha.kellner@t-online.de

🔗mschulter <MSCHULTER@VALUE.NET>