Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum I've made up my mind about Bach's WTC and ET

When I first saw this title, I thought to myself, I thought, here's Jeff setting out to have some fun with us.

Now I'm convinced of it.

Good on yer.

Jones let the squiggles guide his tuning hammer before playing triads.

rXd:

It is more like me saying, "You guys tried to fool me, but it didn't work."

Both, actually.

There is consensus amongst the scholars and debate amongst the rest of humanity. It just means that if you're having a debate, you're not quite scholarly enough.

Regards from another eternally stumbling grade four. (Well, I actually passed grade 7 with merit, but what's left 25 years later is pretty much the same as in your case, scratching around in Chopin Preludes and WTC.)

This brings up a very important question. How close to perfectly equal must a temperament be, to be called equal? Would what might have been considered equal in Bach's time be considered equal now?

Emperor's New Clothes?

That "sounding out of tune" bit is the key to your particular puzzle. That perception is driven by a lifetime of ET or near-ET piano sounds, is it not? It's possible that your past is a hurdle that cannot be overcome in this journey...

My experience seems to indicate that:
1. The vast majority don't care, just give them clean unisons and usable octaves
2. A small minority likes the added palette of tonal tunings.
3. A small minority can't stand anything but near ET.

Then there are some who find that after playing in a tonal tuning for a few weeks, learn to appreciate the palette and find it jarring to go back to ET. I believe this may be the key to "un-training" ones personal musical history; make the commitment to ONLY play a tonal temperament for an extended period of time, then try to compare back to ET.

Left out of this discussion is the chosen "strength" of the chosen Well temperament. There is a HUGE perceptive difference from the players perspective in a tuning with a maximum offset of a few cents vs. a tuning with a 5 cent or more offset from ET. There were/are lots of Well Temperaments...

Ron Koval

Ron:

I have mentioned that it is difficult to be objective. Thanks for bringing this up in a new way.

I am reminded of my early musical training on brass instruments - definitively not ET. And then latter vocal training, oddly enough probably ET because of a strict choir director with absolute pitch. So my prejudice could go either way. That is until I started tuning...

Anyway, putting away any predisposition I am still convinced that WTC was written for ET.

[Edit:] And fwiw, I suspect that Chopin's Preludes were written for UT.

I'd second this wholeheartedly, Ron. And I'd also maybe add that some of the folks in categories 2 and 3 may have something to say about the octaves in category 1. Clean double octave? Triple? Quadruple? Or clean octave+fifths? It's this last part that makes the piano sound in tune with itself, and on some instruments, brings out the sonority of the thing as a whole.

Chris S.

P.S. I thought I read somewhere that one must, of course, turn the curli-cue UPSIDE DOWN in order to understand how Bach tuned.

Pure twelfths also demand a precise ET, in my experience.

Neither. The positions have become entrenched and scolars from different camps avoid interaction.

I've read a lot of the literature on the subject but am not an expert at the level of going to Germany to decipher old manuscripts in cold crumbling church archives in the hope of finding a hint, or learning to write old German with a feather to determine how if the curlies are easier to write upside down.

From what I've read I conclude that there is no direct evidence either way regarding how Bach tuned. The strongest indirect evidence is the title of the WTK as there was a word for ET: Gleichzwebend.

Kees

Hmmm, if Werckmeister defined Wohltemperierte and then Bach used this term, hmmm...

Nope, I can't unconvince myself. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, its a duck regardless of what it is called. I have to think that Bach's version of Well Temperament had evolved to be distinguishable from ET in name only.

I agree with rXd in that Bach was a "devious old prankster."

I recently aquired Owen Jorgensen's book "Tuning the Historical Temperaments by Ear" (the 1977 book and the 1991). Of course he has a good bit to say about this subject. In the foreword of the 1977 book Peter Yates writes, "to recognize that many of the keyboard variations works by Mozart and early variations works by Beethoven seem to have composed or improvised on an instrument tuned to meantone, whereas none of their sonatas accept that tonal limitaion but were composed for a well-tempered instrument; to appreciate the esthetic gain of playing of playing the works by Chopin and the younger Liszt in a well temperament; and will be able to outline with historic accuracy the gradual change of tuning from an unequal to equal temperament, followed by the compensating shifts from diatonicism to chromaticism to atonality. Similar consideration can be given to the correct tuning of orchestral instruments.
Realizations of this historical information will undoubtedly cause more than a little inconvenience, but the gain in real music and musicianship will be worth the trouble-especially in recorded music, which until now has maintained a nearly solid barrier of incorrect performances."

Chew on that! I have never heard anyone mention that Mozart and Beetoven may have used more than one temperament. Thought that might be interesting to some of you.

-Daniel

Well, there is the whole semantic thing that muddles up the concept. Consider that what we know as the Broadwood's Best temperament was considered ET of the day and you realize that there may have been a bit more... variety to the equal temperaments then that we would accept today!

Ron Koval

Greetings,
It is entirely plausible that tuners of the late 1700's would have been tuning meantone, or modified meantone, or equal, or whatever else was the easiest way to placate their clientele. It has always been thus. I doubt that the average tuner of the time was anywhere near as well versed in the theory of what they were doing, nor in contact with other tuners. Makes me think that the speed of change would be far slower than today, and it ain't exactly been turning over the last 150 years.
Bach's WTC played in ET and WT are profoundly different musical experiences for some people, identical to others, and to a few individuals, a clear indication that ET was desired for these 24 pieces. There is no accounting for taste. HOwever, I have found that many people have epiphanies when first hearing alternatives to ET, and many fine musicians have lost all interest in it.
Mozart's near total avoidance of the 4 most remote keys for much of his compositional life has to have reason, and the possibility of virtually all keyboards tuned in what was then known as "keyboard tuning" is as sensible a reason as I can imagine. He certainly wasn't afraid of F# etc, why never a composition in it?
It is hard to hear Beethoven's piano music played side by side with a WT and ET and believe he wanted it to sound like ET. I cannot.
Regards,

I'm not a historian of mathematical history so I may be in error on the specifics here. I do recall either attending a lecture or reading a research article that correlated the emergence of the use of equal temperament with mathematical developments. In my memory that was something to do with logarithms.

Thanks for your comments.

Temperaments exist independent of the ability to describe them mathematically.

I'm not sure what that means. All temperaments can be described mathematically. First theoretically, and then correcting for inharmonicity. The final steps need to be refined by ear, but that is just due to the peculiarities of each instrument.

Maybe you mean the goal is not mathematical?

Maybe you are pointing to how temperaments were developed before the understanding of logarithmic functions, and so being practised artistically, are independent of mathematics?

Mathematics refines the blind and somewhat irregular implementation of all temperament, but of course the end goal is not to satisfy a mathematical equation, but tune an instrument.

I see mathematics here as the servant to better understanding reality, as it usually is.