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Harpsichords and Related Topics

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Subject:
From:
Dr R White <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Harpsichords and Related Topics <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 29 Nov 1998 11:27:46 -0000
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Lucid, as you, Owen reliably manage to be, you pick on Ed Foote's reference
to a musical insight  emphasized by cognoscenti as diverse as Walford
Davies and Spike Hughes in the UK.  Both have been ready commentators and
explicators about music's nature.  To quote SH:"Musicians do not hear
notes; they hear intervals."   WD described synaesthetically the structure
of music as allocation of entities in space i.e. architecturally.
 
> that the point of tuning a keyboard instrument and the point of the whole
> temperament business is NOT the fixing upon a target pitch. It is, as Ed
> Foote pointed out recently, the adjustment of the *relationship* between
> two pitches, i.e. the adjustment of an INTERVAL.<  you wrote.
 
Try to explain to me, please, why a rough-sounding, beating interval seems
to collapse or concertina the space conveyed by the interval:  is the
destruction in fact pivoted upon the elemental relation of two concurrent
or sequential notes or is it most clearly developed to apprehension chiefly
during the passage from one key to another key in a composition, so that
nearer and more remote keys fail to finger out the walls of the harmonic
architectural space ?
 
I am cheered, really so, by reassurances  that a temperament is not lost
always in half an hour's playing on the harpsichord.  My informant worked
busily all over Europe so conditions will have been adverse often enough to
colour her  judgement.  How different, inevitably, from chez Daly.
 
I hope the foregoing is not quite meaningless. The going is very slippery
for my suface-scratching familiarity with music.
 
Bunt.

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