Am 25. Okt 2006 um 16:25 schrieb Brad Lehman:
> Responding to a bunch of different ideas from yesterday's digest,
> excerpted:
>
> =====
>
>>> Let's face it--to the average person in the pew, indeed, to the
>>> average musician, all the various tunings are esoteric enough that
>>> most people are not interested.
>
> Perhaps true; but why spoil it for those who *can* hear those
> subtleties
> and are interested to do so? Look at it this way: if our eyes were
> built with only rods, no cones, we wouldn't care much about color
> because we couldn't perceive it directly...but different colors of
> light
> would exist anyway.
They wouldn't, because there would be no-one to tell us. They would
be some Kantian "Ding an sich" that cannot affect us. -- But your
comparison is valid anyway: If we *lost* our ability to see the
colours because they weren't important anymore, or because our
environment turned colourless (the reverse must have happened around
1950, at least that's what Calvin's dad tells his son), then a lot of
beauty, and possibilities of creating it, would be lost as well.
Learning about different tuning systems to me was an experience I
wouldn't want to miss. They are part of the music I love, and they
are part of the development of Western music as a whole. Large
portions of the repertoire were conceived with these intervals in the
ear of composers and players -- and with no serious alternative. If
those tuning systems were doomed deficient, then the music that made
use thereof would be as well. Ignoring the beauties and challenges
offered by non-equal tuning systems would be plainly, well, ignorant.
Is it possible that part of our problem here is that an organ is such
a huge and expensive thing? Tuning it this way or that will leave you
with the consequences for a long, long time, and re-tuning it is a
huge and expensive task as well. Old organs that have been tuned
meantone or well-tempered originally should be kept that way or put
back to their original condition, because experience tells that they
sound so much better with the tuning system they were designed for --
the design including scaling, winding, layout, choice of stops etc.
So, all things being equal, the question really is: Do we want to
spend money on a modern organ tuned in a non-equal tuning system?
What the gain, what's the loss?
Best,
Friedrich
----------------------------------------------
Friedrich Sprondel
Journalist · Musikwissenschaftler
Hildastraße 48 · D-79102 Freiburg
Tel. 0761 / 285 96 22 · Mobil 0178 / 393 57 52
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