Robert Forbes, Yale University History Department, wrote:
 
>       I wonder if you can go into this in a bit more detail.
>I'm not a musician but a historian, and have done some work
>with Handel.  He has some very impassioned letters to colleagues
>which sound like he was an an almost religious crusade (I mean
>that literally) to eradicate the mean-tone temperaments and
>usher in the triumph of well-tempered tunings.  Any thoughts
>about why this issue should have seemingly
>ideological connotations?
 
>Rob
 
My reply:
 
Thanks for the invitation to expound!
 
First, let's make sure we don't confuse "well-tempered" with
equal tempered, as so often has happened in discussions of
the WTC.  A well temperament may be defined as a 'circulating'
temperament, i.e. one which permits the composer to dance
comfortably, albeit lightly, around the backside of the circle
of fifths.  You might think of it as a sort of musical
Northwest Passage.  The composers knew it was there; they
could smell it.  Equal temperament was known for centuries;
most theorists assumed the fretted instruments played in EqT.
 
Problem was, major and minor thirds thus tuned sounded
terrible on the harpsichord. I'm convinced it sounded worse
to them than it does to us today precisely because they grew
up in a musical heritage that was attuned to the subtleties
of unequal termperaments. And the thirds of this particular
tuning were regarded as intolerable.
 
All of these issues, of course, had their proponents on both
 sides, hence the heated debates in the journals of the day,
and the endless ruminations of mathematical constructions of
temperaments.  {IMHO ,most of the latter were the products of
bright persons fascinated by the topic, but not necessarily
involved in the composition and production of music, rather
analogous to the article that appears every ten years or so
in Scientific American by some mathematician or physicist,
explaining how great violins work.)(Excuse me while I don my
flameproof suit.)
 
Which brings us back to Herr Handel.  His harpsichord music
mostly dates from early in his career, most from before he
left Germany.  At this early part of the century, the
temperament question was at its hottest. Werckmeister's
treatise came out in 1696 (check me, someone), Buxtehude
had his organs retuned in something like 1702 (again, please). Handel,
like many other composers of his generation, I'm sure was impatient with
the restraints the old temperaments placed on him as a composer, and he
wanted more freedom to move harmonically than they admitted.  That's
enough to be pretty adamant, if you're walking around with as much
talent inside as this guy had.
 
Perhaps someone else has some knowledge of alleged
philosophical associations with unequal temperaments, but
I don't know of them.
 
Joseph Spencer [log in to unmask]
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