Андреас Веркмейстер @360

In his Génération harmonique (1737) Rameau endorsed equal temperament and, by way of retracting his own views of 11 years before, introduced a new argument in its favour:

He who believes that the different impressions which he receives from the differences caused in each transposed mode by the temperament [now] in use heighten its character and draw greater variety from it, will permit me to tell him that he is mistaken. The sense of variety arises from the intertwining of the keys [l’entrelacement des Modes] and not at all from the alteration of the intervals, which can only displease the ear and consequently distract it from its functions.
Distracting the musical ear from its proper functions is an unpardonable fault in a tuning. Rameau’s argument might well have applied more palpably in France than in Germany, if French unequal tunings were, as they generally appear to have been, less subtle than their German counterparts. Rameau’s authority as a musician was such that the 1749 register of the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences could state, ‘M. Rameau assures us that experience is not opposed to the temperament that he proposes; and in this regard he has earned the right to be taken at his word’. Equal temperament continued to be identified with his name throughout the 18th century in France and occasionally in Italy as well.
In Germany J.N. Ritter, perhaps the most important organ builder in Franconia at the middle of the century, is said to have used equal temperament. Among theorists advocating it Barthold Fritz is especially important, despite the crudeness of his tuning instructions, because in the preface to the second edition (1757) of his Anweisung (1757: the title may be translated as ‘Method for tuning claviers, harpsichords and organs, in a mechanical way, equally pure in all keys’), he reported that C.P.E. Bach had found ‘in my few pages everything … that was necessary and possible’ for a good tuning. C.P.E. Bach’s own advice (1762) for improvising a fantasia mentioned temperaments: on the organ, he said, ‘one must restrain oneself in chromatic passages; at least they should not be advanced sequentially, because organs are seldom well tempered. The clavichord and the piano are the most fitting instruments for our fantasia. Both of them can, and must, be tuned pure’. For Marpurg and others ‘rein’ (‘pure’), which C.P.E. Bach himself here distinguished from ‘gut’ (‘good’ or ‘well’), became a catchword in arguments favouring equal temperament (or at least not a purposefully unequal one). Fritz’s title shows how it came to serve in that capacity; once equal-tempered 3rds were considered acceptable, then a tuning with certain 3rds tempered more heavily could be described as relatively impure. Since C.P.E. Bach was sufficiently concerned to give not only a warning about the limitations of mean-tone but also emphatic advice about the tuning of the clavichord and piano, the fact that he did not recommend exploiting the inflections of a circulating unequal temperament in a genre which, by his own definition, ‘modulates into more keys than is customary in other pieces’ suggests an indifference to those inflections. When C.P.E. Bach spoke of ‘remote’ keys, he meant keys remote from the tonic key, not keys remote from C major or D minor. His compositions, for instance the great rondos from the collections für Kenner und Liebhaber, reflect this neglect of the concept expressed in fig.2 above; and his favourite instrument, the clavichord, was the least likely of all normal keyboard instruments to display to much advantage the niceties of an irregular temperament. If the music of any leading 18th-century German composer ought to be performed in equal temperament, C.P.E. Bach is the best candidate.

No unequivocal conclusion can be established as to the attitude of his father, J.S. Bach, towards the relative merits of equal temperament and a mildly unequal one. On the basis of evidence such as applied above to C.P.E. Bach, Barbour showed (1932) that J.S. Bach would probably not have held a dogmatic opinion (a view rejected by Rasch, 1981). Barbour’s later statement (1951, p.196) that ‘much of Bach’s organ music would have been dreadfully dissonant in any sort of tuning except equal temperament’ is a silly exaggeration, due perhaps to the fact, which he mentioned in a letter of 1948 to A.R. McClure, that Barbour had never heard any keyboard temperament other than equal temperament. John Barnes (1979) investigated the ‘48’ in a fairly subtle type of irregular temperament (see Well-tempered clavier, table 1) and found that the peculiarities of the various keys in that tuning are nicely suited to or accommodated by the music. According to Marpurg (1776), Kirnberger scrupulously reported that Bach, his teacher, had instructed him to tune all major 3rds larger than pure – thus ruling out any unsubtle irregular temperament (such as used by Kirnberger himself). One could readily believe that Bach sometimes exploited the qualities of a particular key as inflected in a typical irregular temperament, sometimes merely accommodated what he knew was likely to be the kind of tuning his published music would be played on, and sometimes – for instance, in the concluding ricercar of the Musical Offering – ignored completely the possibility of intonational shadings.
The most vigorous and articulate late 18th-century champion of equal temperament seems to have been F.W. Marpurg, whose Versuch über die musikalische Temperatur was published in 1776 but who had already advocated equal temperament in his Principes du clavecin (1756). Although capable of meretricious reasoning, he presented, in greater detail than Rameau, numerous forceful arguments, some of which were rendered so valid by historical circumstance that during the 19th century equal temperament became the standard keyboard tuning and, in the West, a widely followed norm of intonation in general. Marpurg (1776) knew that a composer might select a key for reasons ‘that have nothing to do with temperament’; and he saw (as did Tiberius Cavallo in 1788) the advantages of equal temperament in ensemble music, where
so long as not all the instruments playing together, and the vocal parts as well, are intoned in the most perfect agreement in one kind of [irregular] temperament, the composer must obtain the character of his piece, the building up of an emotion, and the strength of expression, from sources quite other than the creative powers of the tuning hammer or cone.
His encounters with the tuning schemes of Kirnberger and C.L.G. von Wiese (see Eitner), as well as his knowledge of the writings of Werckmeister, Neidhardt, Lambert and others, showed him that:
There is only one kind of equal temperament but countless possible types of unequal temperament. Thus the latter opens up to speculative musicians an unstinting source of modifications, and since every musician will readily invent one, the result will be that from time to time we shall be presented with a new type of unequal temperament, and everyone will declare his own the best.
In short, he gave equal temperament decisive preference on both of the counts envisaged by Fontenelle, who had written in 1711: ‘After these motley combats, one system will become victorious. If fortune favours the best system, music will gain thereby a real advantage; and in any case it will at least profit from the convenience of having the same ideas and the same language accepted everywhere’.
D.G. Türk (1802) extended Rameau’s argument of 1737 cited above by suggesting that a sameness of quality among the various keys would contribute to unity of character in a composition. Influential musicians supported equal temperament in Italy (Asioli, 1816) and England (Crotch, 1812 and, invoking J.S. Bach, 1833). Hummel’s Anweisung zum Piano-Forte Spiel (1828) concluded with a discussion of tuning that justified ignoring the old, unequal temperaments on the grounds that they presented, particularly for the many novice tuners brought into the trade by the popularity of the piano, greater difficulties than equal temperament and that these difficulties were aggravated critically by the burden of tuning, on modern pianos, three heavy strings for each note instead of two thin ones as on older instruments. Jousse, in a book on piano tuning (1832) dedicated to W.F. Collard, expressed preference for a subtly unequal temperament, but Claude Montal (1834) gave instructions solely for equal temperament on the piano. In the 1840s Alfred Hipkins persuaded the Broadwood firm to tune their pianos in equal temperament, which he must have used when tuning for Chopin in London in 1848. Cavaillé-Coll (in his maturity) and contemporary German organ builders used it; almost all the English organ builders resisted until after the Great Exhibition of 1851, but their notebooks show that from the mid-1850s until the 1870s, rebuilt or reconditioned church organs were usually raised to the current concert pitch and converted to equal temperament (see Mackenzie, 1980).
A relatively late development was the widespread use of more refined tuning procedures than those of Rameau or Fritz, in order to guarantee uniformity among the 3rds and 6ths. (In reality this can seldom be achieved by tempering all the 5ths and 4ths alike or by matching unisons with a monochord. See Equal temperament and Tuning.) Sorge’s method (1749, republished by Marpurg, 1756, Roesner, c1765, and Bossler, 1782) was to temper a chain of major 3rds (C–E–Ghttp://www.forumklassika.ru/..%5CImages%5Csharp.gif/Ahttp://www.forumklassika.ru/..%5CImages%5Cflat.gif–C) before tempering any of the 5ths, and after setting the 5ths in three chains of four each (rather than one chain of 12), to check whether all 12 major triads, ascending chromatically, ‘are equally sharp to one another’. A sufficiently exact yardstick for ‘equally sharp’ gained currency during the 19th century – that each major 3rd or 6th should beat no slower than the one below and no faster than the one above.
Equal temperament in this more exact sense is virtually considered an inherent characteristic of the modern concert piano. Indeed the ideals of sonority in the acoustic design of the modern piano and in all but the more radical forms of modern pianism are as intimately bound to the acoustic qualities of equal temperament as any previous keyboard style ever was to its contemporary style of intonation. The enharmonic facility of Brahms or Fauré, the hovering sonorities of Debussy, the timbral poise of Webern, the slickness of the most urbane jazz chord progressions, all rely implicitly on the hue of equal temperament as much as on the other normal characteristics of the instrument’s tone. An 18th-century tuning usually sounds as inappropriate for this music as the piano would seem visually if its glossy black finish were replaced by an 18th-century décor.

Офтопик подчищен. Прошу не стесняться использовать в том числе русский язык для обсуждения темы потока. Благодарю за понимание.

Цитата:

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Сообщение от Сергей

Офтопик подчищен. Прошу не стесняться использовать в том числе русский язык для обсуждения темы потока. Благодарю за понимание.

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Это и предлагалось. Но Вы подчистили замечания русского и оставили треп эмигрантов.

Я оставил лишь тот "трёп", что относится к теме потока, а удалил то, что не относилось, в том числе не меньше 16 сообщений "эмигрантов".

Вы можете удалить ВСЕ мои посты.
Я не обижусь :lol:

Roman
А можно спросить откуда Вы привели цитату?
И что Вы можете сказать про вот эту книгу, упомянутую в соседнем топике:

http://www.forumklassika.ru/showpost...&postcount=409

Цитата:

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Сообщение от BrakeFluid

Roman
А можно спросить откуда Вы привели цитату?
И что вы можете сказать про вот эту книгу, упомянутую в соседнем топике:

http://www.forumklassika.ru/showpost...&postcount=409

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Цитата из Гроува. Книжку целиком не читал, но судя по выборкам она изрядно тенденциозна.
Также я как неклавишник- против неравномерной темперации, которая на мое ИМХО привносит в музыку некоторый элемент акустического паясничанья.

Цитата:

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Сообщение от Roman

Цитата из Гроува. Книжку целиком не читал, но судя по выборкам она изрядно тенденциозна.
Также я как неклавишник- против неравномерной темперации, которая на мое ИМХО привносит в музыку некоторый элемент акустического паясничанья.

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Ну, если Вы действительно не слышите разницу...
К сожалению, есть много людей, не отличающих чистую квинту от суженной.
Я убеждён в преимуществах неравномерной темперации при исполнении музыки, написанной до примерно 1800.

И если это создаёт трудности струнникам - это их проблемы. Они же за это деньги получают :lol:

Я слышу ту разницу, но разнообразие терций мне режет ухо намного больше.

Цитата:

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Сообщение от sesquialtera

Ну, если Вы действительно не слышите разницу...
К сожалению, есть много людей, не отличающих чистую квинту от суженной.
Я убеждён в преимуществах неравномерной темперации при исполнении музыки, написанной до примерно 1800.

И если это создаёт трудности струнникам - это их проблемы. Они же за это деньги получают :lol:

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