Re : mean-tone clavichord?

Judith, I know about the Finnish harpsichord player and composer Jukka
Tiensuu. He uses meantone in own compositions. There should be some kind of
Finnish Music Information Center on the Internet.

--Wim

----------

> From: Judith Conrad <jconrad@shell1.tiac.net>
>
> Hi -- I'm negotiating about participating next year as a clavichordist in
> a concert of contemporary music written for early keyboards. Two
> questions:
>
> 1. Does anybody know of any written recently for small mean-tome
> clavichord? (anybody want to write some?) Everything I've got seems to
> need 5 octaves.
>
> 2. I have some 20th century Serbo-Croatian piano music that I love on
> clavichord; what tuning would be the most appropriate?
>
> Judith Conrad, Clavichord Player (jconrad@tiac.net)
> Music Minister, Calvary Baptist Church, Providence, RI
> Director of Fall River Fipple Fluters
> Piano and Harpsichord Tuner-Technician

On Sat, 19 Feb 2000, Wim Hoogewerf wrote:

> Judith, I know about the Finnish harpsichord player and composer Jukka
> Tiensuu. He uses meantone in own compositions. There should be some kind of
> Finnish Music Information Center on the Internet.

Yes, quite a nice one, www.fimic.fi

Tiensuu was born in 1948, wrote a piece called Fantango in 1984 for
keyboard instrument ad lib in unequal temperament!

Thanks!

Judy

> On Sat, 19 Feb 2000, Wim Hoogewerf wrote:
>
> > Judith, I know about the Finnish harpsichord player and composer Jukka
> > Tiensuu. He uses meantone in own compositions. ...

To which I replied:
> Tiensuu was born in 1948, wrote a piece called Fantango in 1984 for
> keyboard instrument ad lib in unequal temperament!

But in the cold light of morning (which today is filtered through freezing
rain) I feel like clarifying something. Triple-fretted meantone clavichord
is not just another color of keyboard. The triple-fretting going down deep
into the tenor octave means that 3 adjacent notes share a string pair and
can't be played simultaneously. This isn't that much of a problem in 17th
century music, they seldom used chords such as say dominant seventh in
inversion where two notes only one whole step apart were in the chord. But
in music of the last 2 1/2 centuries it happens all the time, and writing
around this isn't going to happen without conscious effort!

Double-fretted clavichords have a sensible layout of one string per
'natural', with 5 of them per octave shared with an accidental; in
mean-tone keys this seldom causes problems (and in fact in the Well
Tempered Clavier even in the remote keys the frets don't cause that much
trouble). But there is no particular sense to the pattern of sharing of
strings in a triple-fretted, at least none that baroque composition brings
out. The one nice thing is that you can set 3 perfect thirds in your
'temperament' octave (assuming properly-placed-at-the-'factory' frets, and
you have nothing left to tune but octaves.

Judy