Oh yes. It clangs and sounds ugly. Clearly
The comments on the videos on YouTube are of significant variance with yours.
I'm organising a seminar on temperament on 6th May 2019 in England and were you to come you'd meet a number of musicians and technicians of variance to your opinion. Perhaps you might find it interesting to meet them.
One of the most interesting things is the extent to which a harmonic tuning can improve the sound of the instrument as well as making sense of original pedalling of Chopin and Beethoven.
Evidence please. Or otherwise your post becomes otherwise a reflection only of your own performance.
Thanks. I have to say I much prefer the tuning in the Chopin; the minor seconds really started to grate after a while in the Tempest.
I agree. The harsh minor seconds made my teeth hurt. A sensitive piano tuner would have realized this and picked a different non-ET tuning. Of course, ET would prevent these types of mishaps.
There are three tunings used for the Tempest experiments. And experiments are what these recordings are. Are you talking about the Meantone on the 1802 Stodart, the Kirnberger on the 1819 and 1859 instruments or the Kellner on the 1905 baby grand in the outside recital?
latrobe, I was going to stay out of this discussion from now on but I've been thinking about it and I have a couple of serious questions I'd like to ask;1. It seems to me there needs to be a standard tuning otherwise it would be a nightmare for musicians to collaborate and perform together so are you hoping to make some sort of UT the new standard tuning? If so, exactly which tuning are you promoting and what makes that tuning preferable to it's alternatives?2. Imagine I am a composer. You come to my house to tune my piano and convince me to go with UT. You tune my piano, I pay you, you leave. Now I sit down to write a fugue. The exposition sounds great and I am happy with the colour of the subject and counter-subject. Then I get to the development section and decide I need to modulate to a remote key, however, I also want to subject and counter-subject to keep thier characteristics from the exposition. Given that in UT each key has different characteristics, what am I supposed to do in that situation?
The key starts now to be a tool which you can explore and exploit as a composer.
Here is a well thought out and clearly written article in defense of ET. It makes some excellent points IMO;https://my.ptg.org/blogs/larry-lobel/2011/08/24/in-defense-of-equal-temperament-part-ihttps://my.ptg.org/blogs/larry-lobel/2011/08/24/in-defense-of-equal-temperament-part-ii
HTs (Historical Temperaments) on modern instruments make no sense because our pianos with their much higher tension scales, when tuned in HTs do not reproduce the sounds our ancestors heard on the instruments of their day, and are just a parody of what is intended. “We are not going to make a modern instrument sound like a 19th-century instrument by tuning it in a different temperament!” *. . . . Equal Temperament has admirably served the requirements of mainstream musicians for at least a hundred years. Piano tuners, like doctors, are obligated to ‘do no harm’ to our customer’s pianos or musical enjoyment.
Interesting...the point quoted by 'LIIW'.. the assertion of how tension of strings on modern pianos affect the HT... This certainly pushes the debate.. . . . The piano, having a quick decay, might be harder to hear 'up front' the harmonic difference than say, with the string quartet.. and the adjustments (intuitively?) made for resonance, or w less beats. Or think of the resonance of barbershop quartets... It is easier to hear (generally) the affect - (due to the sustain factor).. . . . I feel this argument has mostly pertained to music pre 20th century, though with modern composition, this tuning debate is a whole other kettle of fish..
Wow! You have so much secret insider knowledge!!
Please allow me to ask - do you tune instruments yourself?I do have insider knowledge from so doing.Best wishesDavid P
The point about unequal temperament is that melodic lines take on a more interesting structure and chords shape-shift. Emotion aside, this makes the music intrinsically more interesting and equal temperament more boring and grey. In the case of the Raindrop, the tuning makes the clouds darker and the mist more obscure and the rain dropping at times onto a tin roof with a metallic twang and the glimpses of sun are more that mid mediterranean stronger sun than we see in the greyness of more northerly climes.
When one moves to Meantone, the emotions are displayed.
This led to my tuning of an 1802 piano in Meantone, with dramatic effect in the Mozart K280 sonata relating to being buried in the grave and coming to life again and illuminating Beethoven's Tempest with the ethereal and supernatural atmosphere intended from Shakespeare's play 'The Enchanted Isle'
The tunings often give a subliminal effect which affects both performer and more unconsciously the audience. A deeper emotional effect is experienced.
This is F minor. The key of death, grief and mourning. Inconsolable despair. The slough of despond. The use of specific keys by composers for specific emotional effect is real. And it's not imaginary. You can hear it.
If you _listen_ to the meantone performance of the Tempest then the interference of the supernatural and the ethereal is audible and the music itself proves the connexion for those who have musical ears to hear. The fact that you appear not to be able to do so, together with a disputatious approach towards that which is readily researched merely to demonstrate yourself to be Kleverer than others somewhat disqualifies your opinions in this thread from having much weight.
Well actually if you read my paper on Mozart and the colour of tuning in Mozart's day you'll see that the quote that you specifically chose relating to K280, to Meantone very much makes sense. If you _listen_ to my recording of the slow movement of the K280 you'll hear expressions of sadness, grief, objection "why has this happened to me" and a whole host of emotions consistent with being buried in the grave and consistent with the reported attributes of the key of F minor.
With regard to shape-shifting of chords is an example where through modulation the temperament gives us landmarks on the journey through the piece.
If you or anyone else comments disparagingly without having done the experiments, nor the calculations, you're demonstrating lack of scientific objectivity that you espouse. Scientific method requires doing the experiments.
The software provides the tool and as a statistician you're able to do the mathematics on the subject of harmonic accordance.
Those who actually tune, hear. What we hear is an analogue of the mathematics. It's not written but is valid.
The Raindrop becomes a really interesting example when we play it on a tuning with harmonic accordance.
Chopin is known for […] having practiced on the pantalon. Without dampers the pantalon encaptures the spirit of the hammered dulcimer at the heart of folk music and which so inspired much of the origins of Chopin's music.
[…] the raindrop can cease to be the rather boring sound we hear on recordings on Classic FM and instead becomes the landscape and seascape at Valdemosa or Deia in Mallorca nearby. One can see the still sea and mist and not see the junction of sea and sky, with drizzle falling out of the mist, black clouds and sunshine shining through.
Music nowadays has tended towards the circus act of speed and volume and virtuosity with accuracy aiming for a repeatable performance on a standard instrument in a standard tuning in which all is standard and each of the keys are the same without variation.
This is distracting from the music, from musicality, from musicians listening to the sound and adapting to what they hear and what is written into the music. This is why I say insistently that equal temperament is bad for music. Real music.
With regard to the Meantone experiment with Beethoven's tempest you'll see on that YouTube page the comments of someone who starts as derogatorily as yourself…
… but then goes to find the original Shakespeare play and then sees, hears and understands the music and the pointer I've given.In quoting this example you appear to have not done the homework to which I've pointed.
The experiment that you did was admirable but was singular, on a low statistical level and unfocussed on what you were looking for. "Does it sound nice" is one question but "Is there any purpose to changing interval sizes and what effects to they give?" is another whilst "What effect do different interval sizes have on resonance?" is another.
Whilst matters of tuning and opinion can be subjective as a matter of taste and personal taste and conditioning, the harmonic series is something fixed with which there is no room for anything subjective or a matter of mere opinion. Questions relating to the extent to which one moves notes in tuning and their effect, and as to whether composers exploited it, and what effect this has on the piano sound and technique of playing the instrument are very much more intertwined and complex than the experiment in subjectivity you conducted.
One page of gentlemanly discussion on this thread and examples in 8 years then two pages of controversy in less than a month speaks for itself about the nature of current contributors. […] Until those who consider that my work in this thread should be "debunked" have explored those practical and academic areas, their debunking is flawed and a matter of trolling
....music is an abstract art form and therefore doesn't actually express anything (the emotions we feel while listening to music are projected onto the music by us, not the other way round)..
example of Kirnberger’s student supporters is Georg Friedrich Tempelhof 1737-1807). Rita Steblin paraphrases Templehof’s views: “He argues as follows: if the keys of the ancients could produce particular effects why should our keys not have the same ability? Even untrained ears, he continues, perceive that each key possess a special quality: one key is somewhat gentle, sweet, serious, melancholy, tragic or fearful; another is somewhat joyful, lively, sumptuous, etc. The individual colour of each key is caused, for the most part, by the varying degrees of impurity in the intervals. If it were possible to have only pure intervals in every key, music would be deprived of one of its greatest beauties: no one could distinguish in which key a piece was being played. The same argument holds for a system in which no interval is made pure; this is sufficient reason to reject equal temperament. The Kirnberger temperament, on the other hand, is the best of all tuning systems since each key is differentiated from the others” (Steblin, p.93). Tempelhof’s Gedanken _ber die Temperatur des Herrn Kirnberger, Berlin and Leipzig: Decker, 1775, see especially pp. 3-11.
I don't think it's possible to explain to someone who can't see red or blue what green looks like.
Mr. ELLIS, in conclusion, said his main object had been to show how experiments might be made, so as to verify the statements of Helmholtz. His harmonium was tuned by making seven major chords perfect, and by its help almost every experiment needed might be tried. Ordinary tuning- forks, and ordinary jars, tuned with a little water, served to produce the simple tones, and to hear their beats as distinguished from the others. Those who wished really to study Helmholtz's book would find it necessary to have something to guide their ear, for though it was said by Dr. Macfarren, that you could hear the right through the wrong, it was very difficult for the ma majority of people, who never happened to have heard the right.
Topic: Chopin 24 preludes - should they be performed in Unequal Temperament? 