Posted on 02/20/2023 7:11:51 AM PST by CharlesOConnell
Your opinion is as important as anyone's, but for your own satisfaction, you need to do some heavy lifting, to develop the self discipline of exploring works with which you may not be familiar, and broadening your horizons. Professional musicologists have no better taste than you, but they can get lost down the rabbit hole of their own studies. (Our opinions are as good as anyone else's.) You can imbibe some of the greatest music ever written, but you should seek an experienced guide–it has been my hobby for 40 years. (An academic sent me in a wrong direction, claiming that the Canonic Variations on "Vom Himmel hoch da komm' ich her" as one of Bach's top masterworks. When I returned to that piece after getting considerable experience on my own, it wasn't even in the top 10, as I see it.)
This is my hierarchy of Bach's Keyboard Works, though I am not concentrating on some other valid categories:
WTC II is great bread and butter music. You can’t listen to the Goldberg Variations every day, but you can listen to the WTC II every day.
The organ was one among other instruments Bach mastered, but the Trio Sonatas on pedal harpsichord may have been composed on that home instrument, as master-class instruction for Bach’s sons.
BTTT
What do you think of Glenn Gould’s version of it?
Being a bumpkin, I first thought a well tempered clavier was a harpsichord or piano that was well tuned to the 12-tone tempered octive.
But the post indicates that it is a collection of musical compositions for multiple keyboard instruments. Why was the term “well tempered clavier” chosen.
And Wikipedia mentions “short tempered clavier”. Hmm.
Thank you for giving us this gift.I am an 80 yr old shut in, and need to switch off watching the downfall of the USA and get back in touch with music.
This is going to be the beginning of music and meditation on breaks to soothe my troubled soul.
A list like this needs the Brandenburg Concertos.
Bookmark
“Why was the term “well tempered clavier” chosen.”
They weren’t yet using the “equal temperament” system we use now, but they had developed some precursors of that system to allow keyboardists to play in any key without having to retune the instrument for every song. The work contains songs in every one of the 24 keys, so that type of tuning system was a necessity in order to be able to play this kind of collection.
Is that anything like a duck billed clavicle?
“They weren’t yet using the “equal temperament” system ...”
Very interesting. Thanks!
Have you realized how “lucky” the 12-tone octave is where each successive halftone is the 12th root of two from its neighbor.
That irrational ratio produces intervals very, very close to the ‘perfect’ intervals.
I don’t know if it’s “luck”; I think it all comes down to the fundamentals of harmonics. Like, you could divide the octave into any number of intervals, equal or otherwise, but then your notes won’t necessarily line up with any of the notes on the harmonic sequence beyond the octave. The 12-tone division that we use just happens to have most of the important notes of that harmonic sequence represented closely by one of the 12 tones. And for the couple of notes of the sequence that don’t match up, we invented “blues” to add those extra notes back in :)
Because to make an instrument that plays pure harmony in each key signature of composition that might be written, there would have to be a key lever/string activator for every one of 51 frequencies within each octave on the instrument. Otherwise to have only 12 piano keys comprising a perfect octave, for the frequency of each of the strings, some temporizing must be achieved . Any piano tuner can tell you that.
No arguments on Mass in B Minor as one of Bach’s greatest compositions, but do you really want to classify it as a keyboard piece? (The organ in Et incarnatus est and Agnus Dei is sublime, but it’s just one element.)
And that’s why the songs performed by a four-part a capella quartet operating within Bach’s Riemneschneider rules can be so beautiful, because the coupling of the human’s ear with one’s infinitely tunable voice can do exactly what a well-tempered piano can never do, and that is sounding out a perfectly tuned major/minor seventh chord!
“I don’t know if it’s “luck””
It’s mathematical “good fortune”. I don’t have a good enough ear (or is it auditory sense) to pick up the faint beats produced by the tempered scale.
A lot of music has chromatic harmony that would be a nightmare without the 12-tone scale.
It would be good for me to hear a chord played in the 12-tone scale and then in a perfectly tuned-for-that-chord scale.
“It would be good for me to hear a chord played in the 12-tone scale and then in a perfectly tuned-for-that-chord scale.”
You can probably do that on a guitar, if you tune each string specifically, instead of tuning one string to a specific frequency and then tuning the other strings off of that one. Of course you would probably not want to tune the strings to the “correct” frequency in equal temperament, but to the “true” frequency for that specific note.
Thanks Charles.
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