It sounds most odd to us too. It is one more reason why we should like to look at her famously erudite notes to each piece!

Rather paradoxically, I cannot see (contrary to what one might suppose) how whatever temperament was intended could possibly have had any influence upon the key to be used for notational purposes. Howsoever the twelve differing pitches within the octave may have been tuned in relation to each other, the fact is that the way the tuning of the Eb Minor Prelude (Book 1) sounded must have been identical to the way the (same) tuning for the D# Minor Fugue that follows it must have sounded. The instrument's tuning must have been fixed before either movement was played (unless one incredibly believes that it would have been retuned somehow between the two movements!). So (as in Book 2) both could have been notated in the same key visually (had Bach wanted it). So nothing to do with 'temperament' can really explain this difference in notation.

Baz

Well that kind of is my point.  Maybe I'm being obtuse about this, or not expressing myself clearly, but I'm still not sure how this argues against what I'm saying (with no evidence - it all just kind of occurred to me right now).  I by no means think anything was retuned - I think the whole point of both volumes is that a single temperament was used for the entire cycle.  (Whether it should be the same temperament for each volume is another question I have no idea of the answer to.)

Of course E-flat and D-sharp would "sound" the same as each other within the same temperament.  But that's exactly why it could be significant that Bach chose to change the notation.  He could be making a point that the E-flat/D-sharp note, within his temperament, is tempered so that the pitch (relative to the C) works as either note.  A justly tuned E-flat would be a lot higher than a justly tuned D-sharp.  If the E-flat was tuned as an E-flat, it would be a nonsense to then notate something in D-sharp.  Perhaps, then, his notating the piece in both keys is a clue that the note should tempered in between the two alternatives.

At some point in the cycle there has to be an enharmonic shift.  Otherwise we'd end up at B-sharp instead of back at C.  In mean-tone tunings, you have to decide which notes are sharps and which notes are flats to get the shift back to C.  Accidentals can't do double-duty without sounding completely wrong.  You can't even get to a key like E-flat minor because you'd be bringing the wolf fifth into the prevailing keys.  By notating a prelude in one key and its fugue in the corresponding one, maybe this is Bach's way of saying, "this is where ordinarily things wouldn't work, but in my exciting "well" tempered tuning, it does - both ways."

Sorry to bang on about it, especially as I've only just spontaneously thought of it now and haven't actually followed it up with any systematic thought, but I just want to be sure I'm being clear about what I really mean.

A dog with a bone continues to scratch her head (or something like that)...


I'm looking at it the other way around because I'm assuming that Bach's Well-tempered system was a new invention of his, unknown to other players, that he would have wanted to demonstrate and disseminate this new system, and that volume I of the WTC was his way of doing so.  I'm just wondering if these notation issues weren't another way (besides the infamous squiggle) Bach gave his contemporaries - and us - a clue what that Well-tempered system actually is.  Wild stab in the dark, I know - but thinking at it from this direction is why I'm "putting the cart before the horse" I suppose.


I know I'm speaking from a string player's point of view - which means I bring much ignorance (or worse, a little knowledge) and great tuning flexibility to the topic.  But I'm pretty sure when I've played in quarter-comma mean tone, certain keys do indeed contain pure thirds.

***ok, I've just dug out some old notes and I'm very confused.  Quarter-comma indeed has no pure fifths - they're all appalling - but this results in pure thirds everywhere except where they cross the wolf fifth Gsharp to Eflat.  Werkmeister III seems to have a good handful of pure fifths - particularly interesting to a violinist is the pure fifth between A and E.  Kirnberger, who was a student of Bach, came up with a temperament that tempers (by a quarter-comma) only the four fifths between C and E, resulting in a pure third there.  In every circle of fifths I've got scribbled out, it's Gsharp/Aflat to Dsharp/Eflat that marks the potential spot for a wolf interval - so a relatively smooth transition over those notes would be crucial to a well-tempered system.  (I've also made a note that "Silbermann, Bach's favourite organ builder, tuned in 1/6 comma meantone" - any idea if this is true, Baz?)

Ugh, time for bed I think!  Thanks for listening to - and responding to! - my meandering thoughts.

Here (rapid-share / send-space) in an equally crackpot but eminently clear interpretation is the F sharp major Fugue to go with yesterday's Prelude. Tovey was uncertain whether the soprano part in bar thirty-four is an intentional "augmented allusion" to the Subject; we on the other hand are absolutely sure that it is.

And it is some time since we have heard from Svyatozluff, so let us bring him in again to-day by way of comparison and contrast. His piano sounds as though it has seen better days, and his recording studio vast and empty - perhaps some Siberian conservatoire. Was this a quite early recording of the Russian mystery pianist we wonder?

More than a little pedantic - probably downright mistaken.

Anyway - have Members heard of the Yamaha Disklavier Pro, "an actual acoustic piano that can, with a computer's help, play back old gramophone records with microscopically accurate timing and sensitivity but without the original glitches"?

It is said to be "sort of like the way" [sic] "scanners with optical character recognition can turn a picture of a document into a word-processing file you can edit. First, the original recording is saved to the built-in computer as a sound file; then the software can begin its analysis. It tracks exactly when each note was hit, how loudly, with what kind of attack, and when and how it was released. Add to that the complexity of what a note does in the air after it is played, interacting with the room's acoustics and other notes around it."

It has been used to resurrect - or, as they term it, re-perform - some early recordings of Cortot and the Northern American Gould (who has been already several times mentioned in this thread).

"We are able to actually clean out some of the wrong notes that Gould played," says Anatoly Larkin, a performance analyst with Zenph. "But we don't do that because our job is to first of all present the accurate artistic statement."

What a mistake that is! A mistaken general policy: not to correct errors in a rendition of Bach's music. A much bigger mistake than Gould's original ones or Mr. Larkin's grossly split infinitives, even. Let us call it mistake number one.

"Colin Eatock is a Canadian music critic who was present when the Zenph team [sic] offered a concert performance of the complete Goldbergs in Toronto in September. He says that for all its cutting-edge technology, the Zenph re-performances are pointing classical music, yet again, into the past. 'I'm not sure that this is what a healthy musical culture does,' Eatock says. 'I mean, the past should be respected and remembered, but a culture that becomes so completely fixated on the past and reproducing the past is, I think, in trouble.'"

Well M. Eatock is probably right there. We have said once already we think that the interpretations of our anonymous crackpot point to the way of the future.

"Zenph will be turning to jazz next, with a recording of 're-performances' of Arthur Tatum, including a live concert performance they hope to re-create, with no one at the piano, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles."

Well that is their mistake number two, and probably the last we shall hear of them. But do members feel that this "Yamaha Disklavier Pro" contraption itself is a good thing? Apologies if it has already been mentioned. More information, and some examples of what it can do to Cortot and Gould, are given here.

Now isn't this endearing? youTube contains so many noteworthy Blair Witch Project reminiscences does it not?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGIlKnMjZP8

Found after searching for the BWV 682 mentioned earlier in the thread by Baz.
Crackpotteriest moment is when mechanical failure, camera vagrancy, a printing press being operated off-camera, and general finger indexterity imported from a lifetime of piano forte playing conspire at 4'41" ff to create mayhem.

Blimey!!

You said that you were off to bed 2 hours ago TF - surely it must be about 3.30am now in Illinois?!

Talk about Blair - what a really stupid way to show off the possession of a pedal clavichord by choosing to play a piece upon it specifically composed for the organ. Every time the pedal crosses the LH it gets lost in the complexity of the counterpoint (organ pedals would automatically need a 16' pitch to cope with this).

I have long thought that this piece was - indeed - one of the really most technically (and intellectually) difficult keyboard pieces to master that he ever wrote! Not only does one have to maintain control over the canonic cantus firmus, but there are three other complex voices weaving elaborate counterpoint around it - frequently criss-crossing. There is then the whole problem of rhythmic syncronization (are the dotted notes really triplets to fit with the triplet figurations that happen concurrently for example?).

I might resurrect this piece from the depths of my mental repertory, and give it a go once more. Who knows, if I feel that I can manage it with a little more fluency than our Blairite here, I may even post the results sometime.

Baz