On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 10:09 PM, Sean Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > From your professional experiences, do choral directers ever explicitly > choose a specific meantone scale? Do you ever get instructions to (not) > temper your frets?
I'm a pro and get hired as such: gun for hire. Sometimes that means I have to shut up and do as I'm told. Sometimes that means I am aksed to be involved, advise, give feed back. On some of my contracts it says Sorge, 1/4 comma mean tone, 1/6 comma mean tone, Valotti, Werckmeister III, Jägermeister IV or equal temperament (if it's ET, they usually don't specify as apparently they're not quite HIP-minded or plain ignorant). Sometimes the conductor calls me beforehand to ask what might be a good idea for the music or what is possible for me. (I even get called by conductors that ask me why their lute player - not me - is refusing to set his frets in MT, it _is_ possible after all, isn't it?) Sometimes the organ/cembalo player and I call each other before hand to decide what to propose to the conductor in case we are fearing to be stuck in ET or somthing Equally Impossible. With some orchestras some temperaments are more or less standard (Florilegium (if their usual organ player plays) = Sorge, Swaen = 1/6 comma mean tone), with some organ/cembalo player I know what to expect (Pieter is Werckmeister-Pieter, blast!, Vincent = close-to-Sorge-but-tuned-by-ear-so-don't-set-your-tuner-on-it, Siebe = 'Bach' temperament), with some music some temperaments are more or less expected (Monteverdi = 1/4 comma mean tone).That's just my experience, FWIW or whatever abbreviating is called for to make this a non-absolute truth. David - happily played ET in many transposed (Dowland and other) songs today -- ******************************* David van Ooijen [email protected] www.davidvanooijen.nl ******************************* To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
