Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

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Many inaccuracies in this article. The Well Tempered Keyboard was certainly a deliberate realization of a particular concept, which makes use of several already-written preludes. Also, egregiously:

>a system of tuning that’s become standard (“well-tempered”). Nothing in his description hints at what these short pieces really are – deep investigations into the character of each key

This system of tuning is obscure, and seldom-used (only occasionally by historical enthusiasts). Possibly confused with equal temperament here. Much less ability for the keys to have different "characters" with equal temperament as well!

>providing for his huge family – 20 children from two marriages

20 births total, yes, but never 20 children alive at the same time, unfortunately.

>Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s music can be dazzling, elegant and highly innovative, but we are unlikely to mark the 300th anniversary of even his best piece.

Hopefully, "we" will be more enlightened than that in the coming few decades.

For that matter, JS Bach himself very obscure as a composer during his lifetime, and for 50 years none of his works were in print... and many still weren't until the late 19th century.

Any fame he had during his life or the period after was for his virtuoso organ performance.

Up until the late 1800s, "Bach" referred to his son, CPE Bach. Liszt, Chopin, and other piano virtuosi of the time really helped revive the music of JS Bach, when a lot of his best works were previously thought of as "too hard" or "not worth it."

There is a great - and probably out of print - book called 'Men, Women and Pianos', by Arthur Loesser, 1954. Highly recommended to get better insight into how the piano was invented, worked its way into society and how the various composers rose to the spotlight and/or were forgotten again. It's the best researched book on the subject I've read.

Very much in print.

https://www.amazon.com/Men-Women-Pianos-Social-History/dp/04...

May have to order a copy.

Thanks for this book recommendation, looks very interesting!

It's available to check out from archive.org. Four different versions, here is one:

https://archive.org/details/menwomenpianosso00loes_0/

I should have also added Mendelssohn to the list here. He loved playing JS Bach both on the violin and the piano, and edited a book of organ toccatas and fugues that is (suspiciously) the first known edition of the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor (the one that all the movie villains like).

Personally, I suspect that Mendelssohn himself wrote the Toccata and Fugue in D minor based on a few fragments from Bach (particularly the subject of the fugue), and as a tribute to Bach. The Toccata is not really in JS Bach's style at all, making several harmonic choices that Bach makes in no other work - although I think the people who suggest that Bach himself wrote that piece would argue that it was likely a transcription of an improvised work, where the counterpoint could be a little less perfect.

This is a really funny passage from wiki:

>The composition has been deemed both "particularly suited to the organ"[14] and "strikingly unorganistic".[28] It has been seen as united by a single ground-thought,[29] but also as containing "passages which have no connection whatever with the chief idea".[14] It has been called "entirely a thing of virtuosity"[30] yet also described as being "not so difficult as it sounds".[21] It has been described as some sort of program music depicting a storm,[30] but also as abstract music, quite the opposite of program music depicting a storm.[31] It has been presented as an emanation of the galant style, yet too dramatic to be anything near that style.[22] Its period of origin has been assumed to have been as early as around 1704,[32] and as late as the 1750s.[10] Its defining characteristics have been associated with extant compositions by Bach (BWV 531, 549a, 578, 911, 914, 922 and several of the solo violin sonatas and partitas),[10][14][33][34][35] and by others (including Nicolaus Bruhns and Johann Heinrich Buttstett),[10] as well as with untraceable earlier versions for other instruments and/or by other composers.[10] It has been deemed too simplistic for it to have been written down by Bach,[10] and too much a stroke of genius to have been composed by anyone else but Bach.[36]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toccata_and_Fugue_in_D_minor,_...

So much for consistency in writers. I think the message is that it is going to influence every listener in its own way, possibly informed by the preconceived notions of that listener.

Mendelssohn is also responsible for reviving Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which I've performed around 60 times.

You can argue that the different keys of equal temperament don't have any special character at all, since they differ only by fundamental frequency and the relationship between scale degrees are exactly the same in each key.

What character they do have may come from how accessible they are on different instruments and the association we have with music written on those instruments. C and G major are easy on the guitar for example.

I was a professional harpsichord tuner for a few years in college and composed a few things. Modern brass instruments still do not play perfectly in equal temperament in their low range, although good players can correct most of the way with their embouchure. The fifth is only about 2 cents (2% of a half step) off, which is easily correctable, but the thirds are strikingly different - about 30 cents off - which can sound jarring. I think this is the only class of instruments left in this situation (and it only happens rarely) due to the fundamental physics of the instrument.

Also, certain instruments sound different in different registers, so transposing a concerto written for B flat clarinet up a 3rd (for example) might sound very weird if you played it on the same B flat clarinet. That is particularly noticeable on woodwinds, though, which have very distinctive register differences - most people probably wouldn't be suspicious if you transposed a piano or string piece.

Up to the mid 1900s, pianos were actually tuned to play well with brass instruments that needed the preservation of a particular harmonic series - keeping pure fifths between A flat and C on the circle of fifths, for instance, and heavily weighting the remaining pure fifths in the tuning system toward the flat side of the circle of fifths. A popular temperament of the time was named after a guy named "Kellner," who wrote about it in the 1970's I think. Equal tempering is a very recent invention.

In contrast, the baroque temperaments, like Werckmeister and the theoretical renditions of Bach's "well-tempering" have more pure fifths in the sharp side of the circle of fifths, driven by the fact that string instruments would be tuned with pure fifths rather than equal tempered fifths.

I think this change in tuning ideas is why a lot of the saddest and most emotionally profound music of the romantic period is written with 2-4 flats in the key signature, while baroque sadness was often in D minor, A minor, or E minor.

>Equal tempering is a very recent invention

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#History :

"The two figures frequently credited with the achievement of exact calculation of equal temperament are Zhu Zaiyu (also romanized as Chu-Tsaiyu. Chinese: 朱載堉) in 1584 and Simon Stevin in 1585."

Maybe it's more accurate to say it's a very recently adopted invention.

Yes, people had worked out the pitches hundreds of years ago, but widespread practical adoption really took until the invention of the electric tuner. Tuning an equally-tempered fifth by ear is difficult and unnatural compared to using a slightly unequal temperament.

Great point about the timbres sounding different in transposition. I didn't realise the thirds were so off in brass instruments, thirty cents is a lot!

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