> Ray wrote: > Retuning individual notes when changing keys may, indeed,
make things sound better, but do we have any information that this was
actually done at the time?  D# and Eb really aren't so  different that one
cringes.

It seems quite likely that occasionally musicians retuned all the Eb's into
D#'s, but there is scarcely any evidence from the sources. In some cases
there is actually strong evidence that this was NEVER done: this is the case
in Flemish Transposing Doubles. The point is, the problem mostly arises in
17th c. music, and there were alternative solutions: available:

1) Sometimes the D# is playable with the Eb because either the note does not
make any offending third-sixth-tenth, or if it does it is brief, or else it
is masked by a trill or another dissonance.
2) Sometimes the music was meant for the not-uncommon enharmonic
14-key-per-octave keyboards (we can see quite a few in museums).
3) In some countries modified meantone tunings were described, where
typically only 9 (rather than 11) fifths were meantone fifths, thus
producing different consequences: one of them was that the sharp between D
and E, instead of being perfect as Eb and producing unplayable "wolves" as
D#, was equally bad, but still perfectly "playable" in both cases.

Needless to say, this matter is fully scrutinised in the modern literature.

Best

CDV

http://temper.braybaroque.ie


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