No one escapes high school band or orchestra without slogging through his Cancan (the actual title is "Galop" from his operetta "Orpehus on the Underworld"). I think I learned the meaning of the derogation 'oomp-pah' from playing the cello part to this piece, which has appeared in myriad good, bad, and indifferent arrangements for young musicians. But this composer wrote many operettas which merit a listen. Played with sparkle and verve, his best work is like champagne, and his melodies are tender and charming. He was also a cello virtusoso and jammed with Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Anton Rubinstein.
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Saw this tweet from goth-chick violinist Rachel Barton Pine yesterday:
Geeking out on "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)" by Ross W. Duffin.
via txt
For a review of the aforementioned book and a decent crash course in what this all means, read "The Wolf at Our Heels: The Centuries-old struggle to play in tune" by Jan Swafford (and the 90-plus comments that follow):
"There have been some 150 tuning systems put forth over the centuries, none of them pure. There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can't be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune."
This article has audio examples, including a side by side comparisons of an identical swatch of Beethoven played in two different tunings. You can spend too much time trying to discern the difference. After a while--it all sounds out of tune.
Unfortunately, the article doesn't have clearer examples of "bad" tunings, with "wolfs" (not cello wolf-tones, but intervals tuners have used to hide the imperfection of their tuning system, purposefully tuning certain notes out of tune with the rest of the octave, "dumping" the impossibilities onto keys they assume composers are unlikely to use. I will hunt for some for upcoming posts.
This doesn't matter to non-keyboard players: "we do what we want" is their motto--warming major thirds, scouring the depths of minor thirds, perfecting or even brightening octaves. It does become an issue when pianists accompany string players, singers, wind players. Sometimes I wonder: do they understand I can't adjust pitch when I play with them...?
But these are all very subtle issues--maybe not subtle to a piano tuner, but as one commenter wrote:
"How many times have I tuned and voiced a piano and had the pianist pronounce that the action is tremendously improved? If the pianist cannot differentiate between the sound and the action, how much more difficult is it for us to differentiate the sound of the voice from the sound of the temperament?"
This speaks to the--I sense a science fair project coming on.
Before reading this article, I never knew there was such a thing as a tuning activist. Maybe, just maybe, I wish I didn't know....but it's too late.
Why do we care about any of this? These are epistemological issues. Can we know anything to be true? Is our music a code for the natural world? Or is our entire system of music a construct, not derived from nature at all.
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