Text: From: jrhodes@pacifier.com.geentroep (John Rhodes) To: editor@foxtail.com Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2001 09:57:22 -0800 Subject: "Tuning" by Owen H. Jorgensen I recently had a chance to browse the 1991 tome by Owen H. Jorgensen on piano tunings, entitled "TUNING - Containing The Perfection of Eighteenth-Century Temperament, The Lost Art of Nineteenth-Century Temperament and the Science of Equal Temperament, Complete With Instructions for Aural and Electronic Tuning" Copyright 1991 by Owen H. Jorgensen, published by Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5202; ISBN 0-87013-290-3 This remarkable book, comprising 768 pages describing 30 to 40 historic temperaments, encompasses tunings and commentary from circa 1636 through circa 1920. This has to be the ultimate reference for any questions regarding historic tunings. (Jorgensen's work is incorporated in the Sanderson AccuTuner.) What I enjoyed most was the staff notation for setting the bearings of each tuning. These are quite easy to read, and comprise three or four pages for each tuning. My impressions were that Jorgensen has captured the technical details of tuning historic temperaments in an excellent reference book. His most important points were: 1. Composers wrote for the instruments of the day. So if the tuning was just, or equal, or something in between, the composers wrote, voiced, and annotated for *that* instrument/tuning. 2. If you want accurate reproduction of a composer's intent, you should play the piece on his instrument, with the proper historic tuning. 3. Most fascinating to me was that the musical community generally realized (though hotly debated) the need for equal temperament circa 1800, but almost a century elapsed before for aural tuning techniques evolved which could provide reasonable accuracy. (Note that the evolution of the method for tuning the equal temperament was coincident with the evolution of the piano itself, especially the scaling of the strings. Until evenly drawn high strength wire, both unwrapped and wrapped, was available in high quality, the inharmonicity of the notes could not progress smoothly up and down the scale. This, in turn, would prevent precise tuning of the beat rates of partials. The ultimate test of a good temperament on any piano is a smooth change of the beat rates as progressive thirds are played -- both in the bearings octave, and outside it.) Each of the tuning methods in the evolution had faults which tended to produce deviations from equal temperament. These deviations were most pronounced in one or two intervals of the "bearings" octave. Different tuning methods would favor/penalize different intervals -- though as the procedures evolved, the errors were made progressively smaller. John Rhodes The table of contents of the book and a sample manuscript for a specific tuning are at http://mmd.foxtail.com/Tech/ -- Robbie

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