On 18 Jan 2007 at 10:02, dc wrote: > What about fretted instruments? I often > play with viola de gamba or theorbo, and both of them can and do use > meantone, for instance.
An organist/harpsichordist friend of mine brought this up when he heard my group's Couperin recording, and scolded us for playing in equal temperament. We then did some experiments. We tunee the organ to 6th-comman meantone (not appropriate, but it is the basis of temperament ordinaire, which would have been a correct tuning), and it was a disaster (one that temp. ord. would not have fixed) -- way too much of the music was completely out of tune, and it's virtually impossible to tune a viol to any form of mean-tone. This also meant that our viol consort had to change to 6th-comma meantone, and that didn't work well either. The problem is that you can't have a pure third between the middle two strings and also have pure thirds and appropriately tempered 5ths in the right places without having frets that snake across the fingerboard in all directions. For instance, if you have your 3rd fret tuned for a pure 3rd E on the C string, the G# on the E string (immediately adjacent) is not right. If you adjust the G#, then the E on the C string is unusable. That's but one example. And then the tenor viol has a whole different set of problems (the F- A interval is not supposed to be a pure third, so you end up with a whole different set of problems). So, you really never can have 6th-comma mean-tone on a viol, any more than you can on a keyboard instrument without split keys. Yes, there is adjustment possible to tune as you play (according to where you place the finger on the fret, amount of pressure, etc.), but the frets themselves can never be set to do anything other than approximate a mean-tone temperament. For the violin family, of course, that whole set of problems is irrelevant, because they can train themselves to place their fingers wherever is appropriate for the current enharmonic spelling, and for the tonal context (a G# will be different from an Ab, but also the G# in an E chord will be different from the G# in a c# minor chord). Of course, viol players tuning in equal temperament (as in my consort) already tune intervals when playing (e.g., 3rds of major chords are always played low in order to approach a pure 3rd). But my experiences with attempting 6th-comma mean-tone taught me that is much more complicated than many commentators make it sound -- it isn't some magic solution to the problems of equal temperament. It has its own set of problems that are surprisingly similar to those of ET. And when playing with a keyboard instrument, it gets *really* problematic (since the keyboard instrument is stuck with one pitch for all enharmonic contexts). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
