Dear all, still a tiny addon to my comment on Monica's message:
On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Monica Hall wrote: > As far as I'm aware the guitar was usually tuned to a sort of equal > temperament - at least that is what Doisi de Velasco says and how else > would they have been able to play in the 12 different major and minor > keys - as they were wont to do? But I do vaguely remember also reading > somewhere that lutenists sometimes did something like this and even > that there was a name for the practice. First: To me the "better than equal" temperaments vere perhaps one of the main reasons to change from classical guitar (in the common meaning of that word) to early music, and to lute instruments! Nowadays the harsh equally tempered major third is to me a difficult thing to listen in the main harmonies of the key. Second: I strongly doubt that the "official" tempered tunings of keyboard instruments are really useful in fretted lutes/theorboes/guitars - we have to use one string/course for many notes... I believe in the practical ways of setting our movable frets, and the use of some "tastini" here and there, see my quotations of V. Galilei: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/wikla/mus/fronimo.html Third: There are many less "radical" temperaments than the variations of the mean tone temperaments. Some of them - being still unequal - allow the use of all the 12 + 12 keys. As far as I have understood it, in the baroque time the slightly different interval relations between the keys was really means of expression, source of expressing different emotions: A key where tonic, subdominant and dominant are quite pure is calm. The more they deviate from pure, the more restless is the expression. All the best, Arto To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
