----- Original Message ----- From: Howard Posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Saturday, March 25, 2006 0:40 am Subject: [LUTE] Re: Mean tone temperament
> Pluckers of fretted things have more flexibility than keyboard > players, > not less, because it's a relatively simple matter to retune a lute > course or two according to the key you want to play in, while on a > harpsichord with two sets of strings (three is not uncommon) you > have > to retune five or ten strings for each not you want to touch up. > Lutenists retune this way all the time, and occasionally adjust frets. However, in Bartolotti's Passacaglie series, each piece ends on a chord to introduce the next. If the implication is a through performance, there isn't time for retuning or repositioning frets. > I'm not sure what you mean by "meantone relationship will not > necessarily be preserved," and I think there's loose use of > "meantone" > in this thread to mean "unequal." Not at all, at least not by me. If a 5-course guitar's frets are spaced to approximate meantone temperament, the spacings of the intervals will be the same under all the strings, which are all tuned to set, non-octave intervals, 3rd and all. Each string will be set in a meantone temperament, but not necessarily in relationship to each other in any key. Moving to remote keys won't be the same "spicy" effect as on a keyboard, but will just be descending further into nonsense. > I don't know what you mean by "really and wholly," but lute > players > used unequally tempered tied-on frets. The Gerle/Dowland > instructions > leave no doubt. I can't disagree, but lute music tends to not feature fully chromatic excursions and moveable chord forms like the guitar music that initiated this chat. Best, Eugene To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
