Re: [tuning] observations of a cellist

john carper wrote,

> Could there be a family of issues that fall under the rubric of
intonation?

This has always been my outlook (or the viewpoint that seems to best
agree with my own experiences).

> I am curious if there are any microtonal analysis of cellist or
violinists playing Bach unaccompianied. I suspect that the musician
works out a "temperment" unique to the music different perhaps than
the temperments we find ossified in keyboards.

If you have the patience to go digging around there, you can find a
whole bunch of posts dealing with this issue/question in the Onelist
tuning archives - mostly initiated by Gerald Eskelin in the not too
distant past that elicited some (informative) replies from Paul
Erlich, Margo Schulter and Daniel Wolf.

Paul C. Greene did an early (1930's?) analysis of unaccompanied
performances by a half dozen violinists playing Kreutzer (sans
vibrato), and Carl Seashore wrote in his "Psychology of Music" --
based on Greene's work -- that, "we reach the striking conclusion that
the violinist, when unaccompanied, does not play consistently in
either the tempered or the natural scale but tends on the whole to
conform with the Pythagorean scale in the intervals here studied."

Dan

John Thaden wrote:

>I hear hours of unaccompanied cello and violin (and contrabass!) in a
>month, those being faves of my wife. I haven't measured, but to my ears,
>the intonation is clearly not 12TET. Violins and cellos are tuned to
>perfect fifths, after all, and like singers, string players are free to
>sweeten those intervals as called for.

A cellist once told me that string players tend to temper (flatten) the
fifths of their open strings. I don't know if he meant that they would do
this when playing exclusively with other strings or whether they would do
it only in the presence of an instrument of fixed pitch. Do you know
anything about this?

John Link

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>Paul C. Greene did an early (1930's?) analysis of unaccompanied
>performances by a half dozen violinists playing Kreutzer (sans
>vibrato), and Carl Seashore wrote in his "Psychology of Music" --
>based on Greene's work -- that, "we reach the striking conclusion that
>the violinist, when unaccompanied, does not play consistently in
>either the tempered or the natural scale but tends on the whole to
>conform with the Pythagorean scale in the intervals here studied."
>
>
>Dan

I suspect this is why my cello teacher advised me to stop tuning all the
open strings to the piano - tune only the A string and use the ear to tune
all the others.

Paolo

>
>I suspect this is why my cello teacher advised me to stop tuning all the
>open strings to the piano - tune only the A string and use the ear to tune
>all the others.
>
>Paolo
>

it's also difficult to tune anything accurately to a piano given string
inharmonicity and the non-unison tuning of the three strings which sound
together. Especially on a bowed string instrument with prominent partials
which can audibly beat with the inharmonic partials of the piano. Also the
piano tone has a rapid decay, which also makes it difficult to tune to.

jason