Re: Transposed Chord name "F flat"

[Arno Waschk]

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 02:28:43 +0100 (CET), Johannes Schindelin  
<address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 2 Nov 2004, Benjamin Esham wrote:
>
> > On Nov 2, 2004, at 6:20 PM, Anthony W. Youngman wrote:
> >
> > > Bear in mind, E and F-flat aren't actually the same note. Not only are
> > > they
> > > different points on the key scale, but in a properly tuned scale they
> > > aren't
> > > even the same frequency! Very close, but not the same.
> >
> > Interesting... this flies in the face of everything I've ever been
> > taught :-D
>
> Not really. I am sure you heard something about the "well tempered
> clavier". It was one of J.S.Bach's greatest achievements: it allowed to
> play through various keys (another thing Bach was great at) without
> the accords sounding wrong.

Well, it is both sure that Bach did not invent a tuning system with equal  
intervals (which was theoretically invented some 150/200 years before his  
compositions) and that he did not use it (those people in that time were  
even proud of those different harmonies in different keys contained  
different amounts of interval tensions resulting in very different  
characters of those keys. E major was a painful thing and meant to be.)

> > Please elaborate on the difference; also, what tuning system are you
> > using?
>
> You can find out about this on
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-Tempered_Clavier
> and
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meantone_temperament
>
> I have to oppose the term "properly tuned", though. There is no such  
> thing
> as a "proper tuning" (see especially "Meantone temperament"). Some people
> are convinced that the Pythagorean temperament is the "correct" one,
> because of its nice mathematical properties. This is, of course, a weak
> argument (i.e. Newton's theory is much nicer in mathematical terms than
> Einstein's theory, let alone Quantum Mechanics).

I find Einstein's mathematics much more beautiful. Not that i understand  
all of it...

> In the Western world, we usually hear equally tempered instruments.

No. Never heard a good string quartet performing a long c major chord?
By the way, no piano is tuned equally temperedly. All octaves have to be  
too big, less the middle ones, more the high upper ones, and the lowest.  
Otherwise sound horrible. Now you may decide to call that way of tuning  
wrong or right...


> That
> is not totally true, though: trumpets, for example, suffer an especially
> strange situation: some notes are played just by altering the embouchure,
> so the interval is constrained by physical laws and the frequency can  
> only
> be an integer number multiplied by the base frequency. For other notes,
> the length of the vibrating air is changed, and this is used to adapt it
> to a "more equal" temperament.
>
> Alphorns don't have this distinction, therefore it sounds wrong to  
> Western
> ears when someone tries to play something else than just
> Tonica-Dominant-Subdominant.

Alphorns are not exactly suitable to perform a thing like a subdominante,  
if you were talking about that...
But if those natural harmonics are supposed to sound wrong in our ears, i  
am not sure whether maybe our ears might be "mistuned" by too many  
midi-sounds being tempered for no reason.

> BTW, yodeling, which has the same
> musical roots as the alphorns, has the same temperament.

Yodeling temperament comes from beer rather than from theoretical ideas.
Yodeling is out of tune by definition. I am bavarian, believe me. (No, i  
am not yodeling myself...)

Greetings, Arno

--
http://www.arnowaschk.de