JS wrote for "Well-Tempered" keyboards, of which "even tempering" was one such tuning known at the time, though not the only one, nor the one he used most often. He tempered his for a particular key, so it also got neighboring ones quite well. You would have to change the tuning slightly for each or write music that specifically avoided certain chords, though there were fewer "wolf tones" than before tempering, the kinds of clashes that would happen if you put 3 different keys of whistles playing the same tune.
The then horrid sound of the tritone, the augmented-fourth / diminished-fifth (play C and F# at the same time), a sound which never sat right no matter what tempering you tried (because the notes were simply on the far side of the circle of 5ths from each other) led to it being called the "devil in music" and it was banned as an interval and a chord base by the church at the time.
CPE was more developing form rather than tonality, as he like many felt that what his father discovered hadn't exhausted itself yet. Mozart and Haydn both studied the Well Tempered Clavier almost religiously.
(Modality wouldn't return to music again until Debussy, who also re-introduced the tritone to music in the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and later in La Mer. Stravinsky would in one part of Rite of Spring play not just the C and F# simultaneously, but the C Minor and F# Minor chords, so in effect he was playing 3 tritones at once. No wonder it sounded scary and, like the Debussy, led to a literal riot among the audience...)
back to temperament: even-tempered popularity came later, in the 19th century, which is why Chopin is so impressive; he was the first to write directly for the even-tempered piano, so his music is the first to reveal all the advantages to it and avoid the disadvantages that Mozart or Beethoven would have noticed in an instant.
what we call modes today, post-even-tempered is also different from what modes were in the early church and the baroque. related, certainly, but not the same thing.
there are many 12-tone scales, either perfect for some keys/chords and horrid for others, OR moderately "ok" for most. modern music is usually written for a particular temperament in mind up front, usually even-tempered chromatics. Certainly the serialists were even-tempered, if writing temperamental music. (sorry)
the real key (ugh, the puns continue) in playing historical music, is finding the right tuning and temperament for the work. I'm currently (while not busy catching up on work) reading a book on exactly that, opening with an anecdote about how famed Beethoven conductor Charles von Donhanyi, then of the Cleveland Orchestra (I have his completely cycle, Telarc records), still had a particular transition in the 9th that simply "never sounded right" no matter what he tried.
The temperament was the problem - Beethoven wrote it for a particular temperament in mind, which is even more impressive since it was in his head and he couldn't actually hear it.
critics of even-tempered scales say that basically nothing sounds "right" in them, and mathematically they are correct. i've been wondering if anybody's experimented with programming a keyboard to automatically modulate its temperament as the music modulates through keys and chords...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-02-07 01:32 am (UTC)The then horrid sound of the tritone, the augmented-fourth / diminished-fifth (play C and F# at the same time), a sound which never sat right no matter what tempering you tried (because the notes were simply on the far side of the circle of 5ths from each other) led to it being called the "devil in music" and it was banned as an interval and a chord base by the church at the time.
CPE was more developing form rather than tonality, as he like many felt that what his father discovered hadn't exhausted itself yet. Mozart and Haydn both studied the Well Tempered Clavier almost religiously.
(Modality wouldn't return to music again until Debussy, who also re-introduced the tritone to music in the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and later in La Mer. Stravinsky would in one part of Rite of Spring play not just the C and F# simultaneously, but the C Minor and F# Minor chords, so in effect he was playing 3 tritones at once. No wonder it sounded scary and, like the Debussy, led to a literal riot among the audience...)
back to temperament: even-tempered popularity came later, in the 19th century, which is why Chopin is so impressive; he was the first to write directly for the even-tempered piano, so his music is the first to reveal all the advantages to it and avoid the disadvantages that Mozart or Beethoven would have noticed in an instant.
what we call modes today, post-even-tempered is also different from what modes were in the early church and the baroque. related, certainly, but not the same thing.
there are many 12-tone scales, either perfect for some keys/chords and horrid for others, OR moderately "ok" for most. modern music is usually written for a particular temperament in mind up front, usually even-tempered chromatics. Certainly the serialists were even-tempered, if writing temperamental music. (sorry)
the real key (ugh, the puns continue) in playing historical music, is finding the right tuning and temperament for the work. I'm currently (while not busy catching up on work) reading a book on exactly that, opening with an anecdote about how famed Beethoven conductor Charles von Donhanyi, then of the Cleveland Orchestra (I have his completely cycle, Telarc records), still had a particular transition in the 9th that simply "never sounded right" no matter what he tried.
The temperament was the problem - Beethoven wrote it for a particular temperament in mind, which is even more impressive since it was in his head and he couldn't actually hear it.
critics of even-tempered scales say that basically nothing sounds "right" in them, and mathematically they are correct. i've been wondering if anybody's experimented with programming a keyboard to automatically modulate its temperament as the music modulates through keys and chords...