----- Original Message ----- From: Howard Posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Friday, March 24, 2006 6:57 pm Subject: [LUTE] Re: Mean tone temperament
> Stewart McCoy wrote: > > > I can think of quite a bit of baroque guitar > > music which explores remote keys, and where equal temperament would > > have to be the order of the day. > > But it would not *have* to be anything of the sort, unless you > assume > that a composer writing in F-sharp major expected it to sound like > C > major a tritone higher. Some 17th-century keyboard pieces wander > into > distant keys, and no one who has looked into it suggests that this > meant the keyboard was tempered equally. The natural assumption > is > that the explorations into keys outside the normal ones were > supposed > to sound weird and outlandish (indeed, "weird" and "outlandish" > mean > "beyond familiar territory"), making the return to comfortable C > or G > more pronounced and even dramatic. The urge to tame the distant > keys > by making the normal keys less in tune has a lot to do with > 20th-century listening habits. However, keyboards can tune every single note. Pluckers of fretted things can only tune a few intervals and the rest is dictated by their frets. If you have frets that span all strings of a lute or guitar (third and all), a meantone relationship will not necessarily be preserved in crossing strings and will make less sense in remote keys; the problems of the not-quite-tempered-at-all fretted instrument will become more evident in remote keys. Unlike keyboards, if guitar music is in remote keys, I can only make sense of approximating equal temperament just because no other temperament scheme will be preserved between strings. To really and wholly tune a guitar or lute in anything but equal temperament, you would need sectioned frets like the experimental guitars of Lacote and Panormo in the mid 1800s. Eugene To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
