HAMming it up yet once again

The mention of the name Willi Apel in our Solage discussion brought to
mind not *only* the _Harvard Dictionary of Music_ but *HAM,* the
_Historical Anthology of Music_ for which Willi Apel edited all the
Medieval selections...

Most students, of course, have this book as a reference, and it is
certainly a handy compendium... It struck me, however, that practically
NONE of the pieces in Volume I, which contains Oriental, Medieval and
Renaissance music, would be in the tuning system implied by the notation:
12-tET.

I wonder if scholars today would be a bit more "sensitive" to this
question, and whether more recent compendiums indicate tunings a bit more
than this one does... which, indeed, wouldn't have to be much, since in
this case it is almost none...

As I think about it, I don't believe tuning was ever ONCE mentioned in any
class I ever took in Medieval or Renaissance music (not at really bad
places, either...). I do not exaggerate.

Wouldn't it be great ["kuyl"] in this day of synthesizers if a compendium
like this could indicate a tuning table in cents, or something of the kind
-- even a generalized description ["i.e. 'meantone'"] so people could play
through on the keyboard something that would at least approximate the
original??

I wonder if this is being done, or anyone has thought of it... (Probably
not...alas...)

Joseph Pehrson

> From: Joseph Pehrson <josephpehrson@compuserve.com>

> Most students, of course, have this book as a reference, and it is
> certainly a handy compendium... It struck me, however, that practically
> NONE of the pieces in Volume I, which contains Oriental, Medieval and
> Renaissance music, would be in the tuning system implied by the notation:
> 12-tET.
>

Indeed, in HAM, the examples are either transcriptions into modern notation
from recordings or modernized versions of original notations. But your point
about the relationship between the notation system and 12tet is historically
backwards.

The familiar notation system used for 12tet predates 12tet. This notation
is basically pythagorean, extending indefinitely by fifths in either
direction through the addition of sharps and flats. When mapped onto
meantone, which has one size of fifths, this indefinite extension is
preserved but the relationship of sharps to flats flips over (i.e. in
meantone db is higher in pitch than c#). When mapped onto 12tet, so-called
enharmonic equivalence is introduced and the chain of fifths becomes a
closed cycle of 12 members.