[tuning] the pervasive legacy of well-temperament (was Bach tuning wohltemperirt)

> From: <ha.kellner@t-online.de>
> To: <tuning@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 10:12 PM
> Subject: Re: [tuning] Re: Bach tuning wohltemperirt
>

Hello Herbert (may I be informal?), and welcome to the list.

I haven't come across your work before, but find it very interesting.
Johnny Reinhard is a good friend, and have sat around talking
about Werckmeister III and the possibility (Johnny would say
probability) of Bach having used it. I was quite convinced that
Johnny was on the right track. So I find your theories fascinating.

I wanted to comment on one particular sentence in your post:

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

I just came across something regarding this on the internet,
and I wish I could find it now. It had to do with the use
of well-temperaments during the late-Baroque and Classical
periods.

The whole development of European music during this time
was deeply rotted in the idea of modulation. This is a very
important consideration, in light of the fact that the preferred
tunings (at least for keyboards) were well-temperaments, because
each and every key would have its own distinct "color" or "flavor".

I'm much more knowledgeable about the Classical symphonic repertoire
than about any other type or period of music which would fall
under the broader umbrella which would also cover Bach's keyboard
works. So what follows is based more on Haydn / Mozart / Beethoven
symphonies than on anything else, and digresses quite a bit from the
topic of Bach's tuning. But I feel that it's relevant anyway.

The evolution of sonata-form during the "Enlightenment" (the period
covering Ha./Mo./Be.) had a *lot* to do with the idea that the
listener would be "traveling" thru the different "colors" of the
different keys.

The whole basis of sonata-form is the act of modulating into a
new key for the second theme during the exposition, but twisting
that modulation during the recapitulation so that the second
theme returns at that point not in *its* original key, but in
the key of the first theme.

This is an inherently dramatic situation, whose development [1]
ultimately led to the styles/methods of Wagner and Schoenberg.
The opening key is firmly established by the first theme, and
the second theme is an intruder into a NEW SONIC TERRITORY,
which a well-temperament would help to delineate.

This sets up a conflict in which various musical motives
are combined and set against each other in an attempt at
resolution: the "development" section. At some point a
resolution is achieved, the recapitulation brings the listener
back "to the top", and the formerly antagonistic second theme
is this time presented comfortably in the movement's "tonic" key.

It's my opinion that the use of a well-temperament makes
all of this *much* more audible.

As I discuss in my webpage on "Mozart's Tuning: 55-EDO"
<http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/55edo/55edo.htm>,
Mozart's keyboards would have normally been tuned in a
well-temperament, but otherwise (i.e., for singers and other
instruments), "correct tuning" for him meant a subset of 55-EDO,
or at least something which approximated 55-EDO and exhibited
the characteristics normally found in meantones.

And as Chesnut states in the article I cite in my webpage,
the "new" Pythagorean-based tuning paradigm came into vogue
right around the time of Mozart's death, so Mozart may have
been one of the last "big" composers to use a meantone basis
for the tuning of his non-keyboard music.

It's also been my contention for a long time that Beethoven's
harmonic usage stressed an equaling-out of pitch relationships,
thus tending to prepare listeners for the acceptance of 12-EDO
as a standard in symphonic music. (12-EDO had already been
generally accepted centuries before for fretted string instruments.)

But the point of all this rambling is that the well-temperament
tuning of keyboards seems to have been the only constant regarding
tuning during this period. Thus, Ha./Mo./Be. (and their
contemporaries) probably all had the key-colors of well-temperament
in mind when they composed much of their music. I have seen
documentation that this was indeed the case for Beethoven.

-----------
NOTE

[1]

Hmm... my choice of the word "development" here turned out to
be a serendipitously nice pun... I was using this word here to refer
to the historical evolution of sonata-form from its beginning,
thru Haydn and Mozart, to some kind of culmination in Beethoven
(who more than anyone else, I think, saw the possibilities and
was able to realize them in sound), and beyond.

But the word also happens to refer, in English-language music-theory
anyway (I know the German is different) to the "development" section
of a sonata-form, which is the "battle-ground" where the drama is resolved.

It was Beethoven's genius in his _Eroica_ symphony to add two
enhancements to this procedure: 1) to introduce *new* material
in the "development" section, and 2) to introduce "developmental"
qualities into the music of the recapitulation, so that final
resolution is delayed until the coda, thus keeping the listener's
attention up to the end. This is an important consideration in
a symphonic movement that is twice as long as any that had been
written before it!

Haydn and Mozart tended to use the "twisted" pseudo-modulation
in the recap as a means toward having some fun - a sort of benign
allusion to the real conflict that ocurred the first time around
in exposition. After this the second theme would be recapitulated
in the movement's "tonic" and all would be well.

But Beethoven really saw the dramatic possibilites of this moment
in the structure, and realized that the resolution of the conflict
could be delayed to a point farther along. This allowed him to
embellish the music of the alleged "recapitulation" with further
variation, which in turn led to the further loosening of structure
and tonality and greater expressivity of Wagner's music-dramas,
then Mahler's symphonies, then Schoenberg's atonality and
expressionism.

I realize that this is a simplistic "this-begat-that" scenario,
and that the actual situation is really much more complicated.
Please indulge me.

But this consideration of the further evolution of musical
attitudes does relate to to your original point about the
difference of the Baroque mind from ours today.

-monz
http://www.monz.org
"All roads lead to n^0"

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