Our perception of the early "lack of tools" is undermined from time to time
by discoveries of early tools.
RT
----- Original Message -----
From: "howard posner" <[email protected]>
To: "Lutelist" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2009 8:36 PM
Subject: [LUTE] Re: ET FunFest
On Sep 25, 2009, at 4:54 PM, Roman Turovsky wrote:
Them Egyptians had no tools to build pyramids either.
Etruscans had no tools to build the city wall of Amelia.
However we have those walls, and some early music playable only in ET.
Your analogy is rather less solid than the pyramids. The notion that
some early music is playable only in ET is based not on physical
evidence, but an assumption grounded only on your own liking for
intonation which is never perfect but never weird.
The odd thing about that assumption is that we now live in era in
which everyone in the West is taught a tuning system in which
intonation is never perfect but never weird, and yet the music most
people listen to departs from that system constantly, usually to
achieve something outside the box. Singers slide in and out of the
ET norm (deliberately in the case of Sinatra or Freddie Mercury,
maybe accidentally in the case of Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison) and
guitarists pull notes all over their their ET-fretted instruments.
Gregor Piatigorsky once complained "Someone sent me some Beatles
albums and I found that they didn't sing in tune." There were
millions of other listeners who didn't seem to mind.
I don't know if Arto has really disproved that the pyramids exist,
but I think you have proved the non-existence of Jimi Hendrix and
B.B. King.
I rather like those excursions into weirdness when those cento
variations or whatever by Frescobaldi or Storace go into remote keys.
*(1903-1976) a leading cellist of his day. I actually found the
interview, which I originally read in the Los Angeles Times in 1972, at:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?
nid50&dat720709&id=oHEUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BQIEAAAAIBAJ&pgP93,3450033
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