commatic drift and my Beethoven JI tuning experiment

Some more thoughts on _a cappella_ JI commatic drift,
my lack of 'absolute pitch', and my Beethoven experiment:

I've never heard a performance of 'tonal' _a cappella_ music,
in any kind of tuning, that violated or negated my sense of a
'tonic'. I'm fairly certain that at least a few of them
were in more-or-less strict 5-limit JI (I'm thinking in
particular of a superb concert I attended a few years ago
at Temple University of works by Orlando di Lasso),
and so I say this to prove my point that some people have a
tolerance for a certain amount of commatic drift.

Clearly, I need to perform some listening experiments in 5-limit
JI to determine precisely the limits of my own tolerance of
commatic drift.

I'm very interested in someday analyzing the tunings that are
present in the recordings of the _a cappella_ R&B group Take 6,
which I admire above all others (including the Bulgarian
women's choir). Anyone else out there a fan of this ensemble?0

I'd like to point out that in my Beethoven experiment,
my sense of the 'tonic' is reinforced by tuning the
'Dominant [V]' chord a comma higher than is usual.

I created this experiment specifically to try to determine
what kinds of JI adjustments may be made in performance to
avoid commatic drift. This, where the adjustments are made
from within a limited set of pitch resources, is in opposition
to the idea kicked around here recently of 'adaptive JI', where
the adjustments are calculated by means of error-averaging.

There have been two postings here in response to my posting
on this Beethoven experiment. How about some feedback about
the actual audio example itself? I'm interested to know what
the rest of you hear and what you have to say about it.

http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/beethove/son9schz.htm

I should probably also acknowledge (before someone else does)
my belief in the appropriateness of rather extreme _rubato_ in
the tempos of a lot of different types of non-dance-oriented
music, and my full application of it here.

Joseph L. Monzo monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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>I've never heard a performance of 'tonal' _a cappella_ music,
>in any kind of tuning, that violated or negated my sense of a
>'tonic'. I'm fairly certain that at least a few of them
>were in more-or-less strict 5-limit JI (I'm thinking in
>particular of a superb concert I attended a few years ago
>at Temple University of works by Orlando di Lasso),
>and so I say this to prove my point that some people have a
>tolerance for a certain amount of commatic drift.

Lassus's music is modal, not tonal; the advent of tonality per
se is associated with the transition between the Renaissance
and Baroque periods.

>I'm very interested in someday analyzing the tunings that are
>present in the recordings of the _a cappella_ R&B group Take 6,
>which I admire above all others (including the Bulgarian
>women's choir). Anyone else out there a fan of this ensemble?

I do think they're wonderful, and certainly often approach JI in
their simultaneities, but the tuning of successive roots is much
less precise and probably resembles 12-tET or even Pythagorean
at least as closely as any version of 5-limit JI (definitely
more closely than any version where the tonic drifts).