AW.: More (or any) Schubert in 5-limit JI

In einer Nachricht vom 12/21/99 3:02:34 AM (MEZ) Mitteleurop�ische Zeit
schreibt josephpehrson@compuserve.com:

<< Thanks to Paul Erlich for clarifying the use of the term "pun" and also for
his clear thinking regarding
Schubert's theoretical basis. If I am to understand this correctly, it
means that pitches would have to be constantly "retuned" in order to affect
a legitimate JI interpretation of Schubert in 5-limit. This retuning would
have to be virtually instantaneous, something perhaps a synthesizer and
sequencer could do... or on the other hand, non-tempered instruments which,
I believe is what Daniel Wolf was getting at. If I understand his posts,
they seem to be suggesting that Schubert is sometimes ALREADY played in
5-limit JI by non-tempered instruments... So, although Schubert is a
"closed 12-tone system," perhaps other things are going on in live
performance. >>

I don't think you've quite got it right. Let's take a hypothetical example,
where a theme modulates through a series of keys by thirds, eventually
returning to the original key. In JI, this would actually miss the octave by
some interval, but in a temperament this interval has be spread out through
the entire progression. In returning to the original key, a temperament
makes a homophone pun between the origin and key that would have been reached
in JI. Had the progression been realized in JI, the destination key could
potentially represent a _heterophone_ pun on the original key. Ironically,
perhaps, the success of this pun may depend on the listeners' conditioned
expectations from temperament.

The more common type of punning is found in pivot chord modulation, where a
given pitch or chord has one identity going in and a second going out.
(Wilson's CPSs are full of wild JI puns of this sort). In addition, there
are ambiguous sonorities where multiple senses of a pun may be simultaneously
heard. In these case, JI tends to disambiguate puns, perhaps not usefully so.

A "pun" is a rhetorical trope which may be also be ironic but not
necessarily; irony is a separate trope. I find harmonic punnning to be a
central element of common practice musical rhetoric. Some puns are
homophone, some heterophone, others portmanteau constructions. In _Finnegans
Wake_, for example, Joyce prefered the latter; Duchamp was a largely
homophone punster, perhaps, as David Antin suggested, an inheritance from the
futurist movement (a pun being a pendulum oscillating between meanings).

With regard to Schubert, I did not make any claim that his chamber music for
strings was or could be played in JI, but rather that a form of adaptive
tuning may be at work. In that is the case, where local instances of JI are
embedded in a tempered global harmonic structure, it would be very
interesting to explore how that global structure was constructed, to hear if
Schubert used different strategies in his music for instruments with flexible
pitch to those in his keyboard music.