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Recently WGUC in Cincinnati played a recording of a piece from The Well-Tempered Clavier played on a well-tempered clavier. Or a well-tempered something that sounded like a clavier, whatever a clavier sounds like, which I wouldn’t know from a harpsichord. Know from the sound of a harpsichord, I mean. (I’m confessing here about my ignorance of classical music, not bragging about that ignorance, which ardly hever appens.)
According to the DJ, the lady who made the recording had enthused over the glorious, rich experience of hearing The Well-Tempered Clavier played on a well-tempered clavier for the first time in her life, and was eager to share the excitement with the world, which is why she made the recording. She pointed out that she was finally hearing the music the way Bach intended for it to sound when he wrote it.
I admit I couldn’t tell the difference, but I am utterly fascinated by the quirky science and math involved in all this arcane stuff about tuning instruments and singing*, how it has changed over the millennia, and how it differs from instrument to instrument even today.
I feel the temptation to share what I’ve learned over the years, and especially over the recent months, and especially in the last 48 hours. But it is a pretty quirky subject, as I said, and I hear someone moving about upstairs sounding like she needs coffee, so I won’t.
Thanks for reading this.
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*Like Pythagorean tuning, the infinite variety of just tunings, all the different mean-tone, well, and equal temperaments, scales (pentatonic, diatonic, 12-tone, and other), the tuning perfectionism of Barbershop Quartet singing, stretched octaves on acoustic pianos (but not electronic ones!), etc.
Discussion (31)
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I said I won’t share, but now that coffee has been served, etc., etc., and so on and so forth, I will take questions and educational comments and corrections from the audience, at least one of whom is an actual credentialed expert on music theory and its history.
I am not a musicologist, I just play one on Ricochet.
(But if your chorus’s second bass pulled up lame due to a Little League coaching injury and you need a sub, let me know.)
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Fifty years ago, there was a loft in New York City, Zuckerman's, where carpenters made assemble-it-yourself kits of harpsichords and clavichords. Quite a few Greenwich Village residents bought them and tried to re-learn what little they remembered from piano lessons in Akron or Shaker Heights. It was a little known, brief lived fad.
But until then I was unfamiliar with the clavichord. It is a quiet instrument.
Nice post, Mark!
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I see now on Wikipedia…
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Well, I could talk about this stuff for hours... pick a starting point. You've certainly hit a number of related issues right there.
The "Well-Tempered Clavier" is a collection of preludes and fugues, in each of the 12 chromatic major keys, and minor keys.
Some argue that it was intended to promote even temperament, as it hit all the keys. And some argue that it was intended for specific temperaments, but those were never specified. So I'm thinking it was more of a workout for trying out various temperaments. As well an incentive to avoid personal cliches by working in atypical keys.
I'm basically of the mind that, while temperament is mathematically fascinating, and you can nerd-out on it forever if you want, in practice it doesn't matter all that much. Less in composition, and more of a performance attribute.
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Fascinating story:
en.wikipedia.org
Open link
And still in production:
zhi.net
Open link
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