Re: brass quintets ...

> >>I beg to differ. I believe if the average music listener heard a brass
> >>choir play in 12tet, they would say they were out of tune.
> >
> >I don't think so. They may notice something was wrong, but I don't think
> >they'd realise it was the tuning.

Carl Lumma wrote:

> Gentlemen, such sweeping statements. Who is this average music listener?
> Last week I had the pleasure of hearing the American Brass Quartet in a
> very intimate setting. This is arguably the world's best quintet, and
> their intonation is astounding -- in everything from early music to the
> latest Sampson quintet featuring "cloud"-like tone clusters. Everyone in
> my party commented on the intonation, as did another fellow I happened to
> overhear afterwards.

And what do you think they (the listeners, average or not) were basing their
judgment of intonation on? I'll bet it was the beatlessness of consonant
chords. Ergo, if the Quartet (all five of them?) used 12tet tuning, these
listeners would not have been so "astounded".

Fred Reinagel

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[Fred Reinagel wrote...]
>And what do you think they (the listeners, average or not) were basing their
>judgment of intonation on? I'll bet it was the beatlessness of consonant
>chords. Ergo, if the Quartet (all five of them?) used 12tet tuning, these
>listeners would not have been so "astounded".

Sorry- "quartet" was a typo. They are the American Brass Quintet, two
trumpets, horn, trombone, and bass trombone.

Yes, I do believe it is the beatless "ring" that people notice. If the
quintet could somehow learn to play in 12tet, the sound would be so rough
by comparison that probably many people would fail to identify them as a
brass group at all upon hearing a recording.

-Carl

Daniel Wolf wrote,

>Contrary to your viewpoint,
>it is when instruments with harmonic spectra use an exact harmonic (as
>opposed to subharmonic) JI that the identities of the individual
instruments
>are masked or blended into the composite sound.

Very good point! Johnny Reinhard has made the same point. That is one reason
why when using "adaptive JI", I think one should stop a couple of cents
short of getting the simulaneities _exactly_ in JI.

I wrote,

>Very good point! Johnny Reinhard has made the same point. That is one
reason
>why when using "adaptive JI", I think one should stop a couple of cents
>short of getting the simulaneities _exactly_ in JI.

Just to amplify, one weird thing that happens when using exact JI (even for
utonal [subharmonic] chords) is that you get unpredictable
phase-cancellations between coinciding partials. A very slow beating ensures
that all phases will rotate through all their allowed values and the
intended harmonic constitution of the instruments will be well-represented.

That said, I think good classical brass ensembles often do a very good job
of keeping their simultaneities within a few cents of JI.