Just having mentioned the amazing scene of endless orchestra tuning, I just have to open another "Box by Pandora". After all, I am among friends, of the keyboard-activated-string club.



The whole scene of ensemble string tuning amazes and annoys me, and I have to think the other audience members too.



Granted, I'm just an engineer with no music degree. Just a long life loving to play the pipe organ and now regular continuo gigs with a wonderful Van Der Putin portative and the aforementioned Zuckerman Flemish with real voicing by Ton Amir.



But



Can anyone explain why just about all the baroque string players I observe refuse to simply tune offstage so they can come on stage to applause and simply start playing? Instead the audience suffers a prolonged sequence of pitches passed from the keyboard to who knows where. It takes <forever>.



Why a section leader will be observed to endlessly crank on a peg even though it started on pitch, and right when they stop tuning with it off pitch, they'll pass that wrong pitch to the other players?



Why the players haven't ever seemed to learned to listen to harmonic beats, the magic trick that made me able to tune my harpsichord?



Why they seem to be trying to get the instrument into perfect fifths, no matter what temperament the keyboard is using?



Why they seem intractability unable to recognize the absurdity of all this, when a harpsichord string can be tuned far more quickly. They can't see that there really is hope for a simpler life.



It's as if the insecurity of vibrato-less playing, and a lack of awareness of tempered harmonies, makes them convinced that if they obsess about tuning, showing how much they care, it will make everything better.



What am I missing? How can I help them?



I have no such difficulties in ensemble with a group of talented recorder players, where we all listen and immediately stop to fix bad chords. Where the savant among us knows which fingering on a particular note of a particular instrument in a particular mode will work best. And then we listen, and lip it in. Pure harmony ensues. Wine follows.



Bruce















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