More replies

Paul Erlich had said earlier:

>>> Anyway, Handel probably composed his
>>> choral works at the organ (or other keyboard) -- are you suggesting that the
>>> enharmonic relations in these works would naturally assume a reversed
>>> direction relative to how Handel heard them if performed by an unaccompanied
>>> choir?

To which I replied:
>
>>No.

Paul:
>
> So G# is not higher than Ab for all kinds of music, is it?

So what's in a name? A rose by any other name......etc. :-) But seriously,
the best argument for a "raised" pitch being higher than a "lowered" one is
the very chromatic music of the mid-seventeenth century. In most of these
slow kaleidoscopic passages, the continuo would likely have been silent.
There would be no way for it to play those passages in any kind of
reasonable tuning, even considering the added digitals used on some
keyboards.

My concern for calling "a spade a spade" is that it contributes to _musical_
performance tuning. For example, performing the melody of "St. Louis Blues,
a singer who puts a stylistic #2 appoggiatura before the first note (E in C)
in the phrase "_I_ hate to see..." will likely put a very low b3 (Eb) on
"...the evening _sun_ go down. Granted this is not a Baroque example, but I
believe that any chromatic music in a "functional harmony" style will make
more harmonic sense when accidentals are performed this way. Call me boorish
and unstylish if you must. That's just the way I see (hear) it.
>
>>I'm just suggesting that keyboard tuning was and is irrelevant to the
>>way ears tend to tune music if left to their own devices.
>
> I think you have to look beyond your concept of a universal "music" to
> specific styles and compositions and the type of tuning issues involved in
> each of them, both in their creation and their subsequent realization. Also
> you should be more cognizant of the degree to which music is a cultural
> "game", and the how meaning of music for us is so strongly dependent on our
> previous experiences with it and the associations it carries.

I'm sure you are right, to some extent. My concern has to do with how that
relates to basic perception of pitch relations regardless of period styles.
Are you still telling me that there is no such thing? My experience prevents
me (so far) from believing that.
>
>>Very likely,
>>"mistuned" keyboards in Handel's day were a bane to vocal tuning, just as
>>they are today.
>
> As far as we know, the pure thirds and low leading tones of meantone tuning
> were most comfortable for the singers of the time.

The key words here are "as far as we know." In fact, we _don't know for
sure.
>
> More on nature vs. nurture:
>
> In Arabic music, the minor third is divided melodically into two nearly
> equal neutral seconds (go listen to some Arabic music and you'll hear this).
> This is a most natural thing for Arabic musicians to sing and they sing it
> without thought. Now you try it. Unless you've listened to a lot of Arabic
> music, you'll probably find this impossible to do. Why? Are our brains,
> ears, or throats structured differently from those of Arabic musicians? Of
> course not. It's just that we've never _experienced_ this, having listened
> to lullabies, symphonies, and other musical events _with cultural meaning_
> in diatonic scales all our lives. What is this new experience? It's got to
> be a mistake, an unskilled amateur trying to sing, right? At first, that's
> what it sounds like. But once we've heard this phenomenon enough times, our
> brain begins to characterize it as something distinct, something meaningful,
> with its own quality, until it finally sounds like a real musical phrase.
> Once one hears it this way, it immediately becomes _far_ easier to sing
> (this happened to me). In the context of Arabic music, which has no triadic
> or functional harmony, this is undoubtedly the _right_ thing to sing,
> whether there is instrumental backing or not. The musical motifs of the
> maqamat have their own structural logic that _coevolved_ with the tuning
> they use. Tuning and style are intimately intertwined and one cannot make
> judgments of "right" and "wrong" in one independently of the other.

No problem here. I'm quite sure I understand your point, but it doesn't
necessarily relate to my concern regarding the tuning of Western music,
which appears to have some basis in acoustical relationships. Note that I
have not claimed that a "high third" is "right" or "wrong." It simply "is."
The discussion of historical practice is rather beside the point. Whether or
not you are "right" in that regard, my observations are my observations. I
have to deal with that. My hope is that you understand what I have
described. I'm not sure you do.

Jerry

>

Jerry wrote,

>But seriously,
>the best argument for a "raised" pitch being higher than a "lowered" one is
>the very chromatic music of the mid-seventeenth century. In most of these
>slow kaleidoscopic passages, the continuo would likely have been silent.
There >would be no way for it to play those passages in any kind of
>reasonable tuning, even considering the added digitals used on some
>keyboards.

Please provide an example.

>My concern for calling "a spade a spade" is that it contributes to
_musical_
>performance tuning. For example, performing the melody of "St. Louis Blues,
>a singer who puts a stylistic #2 appoggiatura before the first note (E in
C)
>in the phrase "_I_ hate to see..." will likely put a very low b3 (Eb) on
>"...the evening _sun_ go down. Granted this is not a Baroque example,

Not in the slightest.

>but I
>believe that any chromatic music in a "functional harmony" style will make
>more harmonic sense when accidentals are performed this way. Call me
boorish
>and unstylish if you must. That's just the way I see (hear) it.

I really think you're overgeneralizing your very specific musical
experiences here.

>I'm sure you are right, to some extent. My concern has to do with how that
>relates to basic perception of pitch relations regardless of period styles.
>Are you still telling me that there is no such thing? My experience
prevents
>me (so far) from believing that.

The only basic pitch relations that I'm willing to believe can be perceived
regardless of period or geographical style are the very simplest ratios --
musical style then leads to combinations (of these ratios) of
ever-increasing complexity and intonational mutability. Why would I believe
anything else? There's no evidence, and Occam's razor (combined with my
knowledge of psychoacoustics) speaks against introducing other intervals
(like the high third) into the palette of universally perceived pitch
relations.

>My hope is that you understand what I have
>described. I'm not sure you do.

I think I do (please correct me if I'm wrong), and I've been trying to help
understand how this "high third" phenomenon might arise. It clearly isn't a
matter of "all music is made up of the simplest acoustical phenomena =
simplest ratios" since there are myriad ratios simpler than any of the "high
third" candidates but which are clearly not used in Western music.