Bach's Tuning (was Re: PITCH Early CD URL for review)

Re: [tuning] PITCH Early CD URL for review

Johnny wrote:

> Location of Early CD on CD Baby: review is at the bottom
>
> http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/pitchrecs2/

Petr: I'm not sure if I'm getting the idea. From the discussion lead here, I
supposed this was going to be performed in the way that (how should I call
them?) "Baroque orchestras" tend to play music -- i.e. pitch of A4 = 415Hz,
different intonation preferences and so on.

Johnny: Hi Petr. This discussion is not about A=415 vs. A=440, etc. There was no concept of absolute pitch that was universal at that time (although Sauveur did work out the principle in Paris).

There was a double standard of pitch centers, one tied to the organ pitch of the C, and the with a different C (played on strings and winds without organ). The relationship between these two different C's were idiosyncratic to different places and different times. They were called "Chor" (church) pitch and Kammer (chamber) pitch.

However, the discussion is about the relationship between the notes (intervals), which is the appropriate array of pitches (tuning), and how is the performance practice to service the tuning.

Petr: I'm realizing I was wrong. In
fact, in the first movement of the 5th Brandenburg concerto, the minor
seconds in the "leading violin" seem to be, as far as I can hear it, even
smaller than in Pythagorean tuning. This is what I call the "melodic" way of
intonation.

Johnny: In the tuning of Werckmeister III, there are a total of 39 distinct musical intervals per octave.
There are 4 different minor seconds, the smallest of which is 90 cents. These different semitones "obviously" occur in different places in all of Bach's pieces, so there is a chromatic quality to all of the music.

Minor 2nds in Werckmeister III
90: C-Db, F-F#
96: Eb-E, G-G#, G#-A, Bb-B
102: C#-D, D-Eb
108: E-F, F#-G, A-Bb, B-C

Petr: Interestingly, for this kind of music, I would prefer to use the
opposite way of intonation (which I call the "choral" intonation) which is
closer to meantone than to Pythagorean. Simply said, the minor seconds are
too narrow for my ears. Maybe I'll need further explanation to understand
what was the aim here.

Johnny: Understood. However, you are dealing with the music from a modern aesthetic. I am fighting against this as a measuring approach. I want to get to the heart of each composer. To that end, I studied the tuning of Bach throughout my life (it was also my Masters thesis) to discover that Werckmeister III has been slimed by the musicological community. My view is they don't hear it and they are hesitant to go against European myth as it applies to the modern 12-et and rationalizations for why it acheived tuning hegemony.

Hope this helps, Johnny
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> Minor 2nds in Werckmeister III
> 90: C-Db, F-Gb
> 96: D#-E, G-Ab, G#-A, A#-B
> 102: C#-D, D-Eb
> 108: E-F, F#-G, A-Bb, B-C

Petr says:
> for this kind of music, I would prefer to use the
opposite way of intonation (which I call the "choral" intonation)
which is closer to meantone than to Pythagorean. Simply sead, the
minor seconds are too narrow for my ears. he wants *wider* minor 2nds
> and a more 'choral' (i.e. just or meantoney) approach

- to which:

> Johnny: Understood. However, you are dealing with the music from a
modern aesthetic.

??

The 'modern' aesthetic is precisely narrow equal-ish semitones doing
duty for minor seconds. This is what Petr says he dislikes!

Now looking at the table, you see that C#-D (most prominent in
Brandenburg 5) is almost *exactly* equal to the equal-tempered
semitone, and F#-G only a little larger. So who's on the side of
'modern' / ET-like semitones here? I would imagine Petr happier with
semitones around 112 or 114... which scarcely exist in well-temperaments.

> I am fighting against this as a measuring approach.

Against what? In this case, Petr seems to think Werckmeister semitones
*too near* ET!

> Werckmeister III has been slimed by the musicological community.

I'm not sure what this means. It's true that non-ET tunings were
widely ignored or deprecated through much of the 20th century. If you
only read musicologists up to 1970 or 1980, you might indeed get an
idea of 'sliming' - however, WIII was hardly worse treated than any
other irregular temperament. If you mean Isacoff ... well, I don't
think anyone should call him a musicologist.

The main opposition to irregular tunings recently has been from
pianists and piano tuners!!

Now in the last few decades musicology has become very much interested
in them (see Lindley as early as 1977). In fact, according to what
people say in the harpsichord discussion group I post to, in the last
couple of decades WIII became a fixture in discussions of Bach tuning,
and has often been used in recordings. So any sense of
Werckmeister-martyrdom is misplaced. Putting harpsichords in WIII has
been done for a long time.

However, not everyone who has advocated irregular tunings has been an
unequivocal supporter of WIII. Suppose that someone prefers something
of Bendeler or Neidhardt or Kirnberger for Bach. Does that mean still
'sliming' WIII?

> My view is they don't hear it

... Or perhaps, nowadays, they heard too much of it, if WIII was used
as a 'default' harpsichord tuning. As a harpsichordist I don't like it
so much in chords like D major (fifth too flat relative to the third)
B major (third too sharp, fifth too flat) and Ab major (Pythagorean
chords run amok). That was, actually, how I got started in this whole
business, trying to get something sounding a bit better than WIII on
my instrument. My main objection has been that the flat fifths are too
much of a sacrifice if none of the thirds are pure. To obtain a major
third such as WIII has at C-E, I would rather tune 1/5-comma between
these notes.

Most 'historically-informed-performance' people I know of have been
aware of tuning questions for some time now. (Which doesn't
necessarily mean they either love or hate WIII...)

~~~T~~~