Post by J.B. WoodHello, all. Good to see some folks still here especially LJS. Just
finished going through Alexander J. Ellis's "On the Temperament of
Musical Instruments with Fixed Tones" (www.jstor.org/stable/112069). I
was somewhat surprised at Ellis's grasp of beats and their employment in
the tempering process, given that this paper was published in 1864. He
presents the pros and cons of a number of n-note tuning systems,
providing a detailed mathematical analysis of each. (Ellis was the one
who proposed the "cent" for measuring the width of musical intervals).
Sincerely,
--
Hey, good to see you as well! Interesting about fixed tones temperament. My first response is, Did he go into most fixed tone instruments such as woodwinds and brass? or was he limited to fixed stringed instruments?
That is a bit earlier than I thought the concept of "cents" was conceived, but not by much.
Sounds interesting no matter what, but since I did have a wind instrument repair store for 10 years, I have always been interested in how they tuned those instruments. I believe it was around the 1920s or so that the reed instruments went from Low Pitch to the A 440 pitch.
One interesting thing I learned about that was that in order to play the older low pitch instruments with the newer 440 ones was to stick a rope down the instrument making the inside smaller and thus raising the pitch. I don't think I ever found the proper size rope to stick down the saxophones or clarinets because I never got them up to pitch that way! :)
I think that it could have been an urban myth started by spme player that could play in tune by shoving the Mouth piece into the horn and lipping the other notes down to catch the tuning. The rope thing is interesting in principle, but would have to be tapered to keep an even temperament since most of the winds are conical and a cylindrical rope, if big enough could raise the pitch but would not keep the temperament.
But if I can find the time (life seems to take up more of it as we age!) I would like to read it and discuss it in a more learned way with you. I have played with various tunings back in college when the high tech was a keyboard with 12 pot controls that allowed us to fine tune each note on the keyboard. My most vivid memories was discovering what a beautiful perfect triad was produced with a true perfect fifth and a third that sounded perfect as it blended perfectly into the harmonic series. That is when I first became enamored with the harmonic series and if you tune the seventh element of the series (that dratted "minor 7th (or is it a Major 6gh) that has been the dominant factor in the evolution of our functional harmony evolved from the older approach set up by Pythagoras that seemed to many to guide the pre Baroque music in Western Civilization.
But again, thanks for being there and sharing that experience and provoking the memories of that part of my life and thanks for bringing back some of the spirit of the old RMT that we all knew and loved so well! Maybe we can entice some of the others to come back and get that old think tank back so younger students can experience some of the musical though that has shaped the music we know today.
I look forward to talking to you about music once again.
LJS
ps
Have you ever seen/listened to Leonard Bernstein's lecture series entitled "The Unsnswered Question" ?