Entering A Minefield

For those of you interested in tuning and temperaments, there is a great two-part series published on YouTube by Early Music Sources. For those of you who were interested in my article on the Well-Tempered Clavier, watching these videos furthers the idea that, no matter how well-articulated the authors of these temperaments were, mathematically-fixed temperaments were not the reality four hundred plus years ago.

Tempers Flare

Below is a  response to Richard Todd’s “Temper Temper”, an article published in April. This response was submitted not more than a few days after Todd's article was published, but I only received confirmation this week that it did not fit the submission guidelines of the same publication. Therefore I have copied it in full for you below.

‘Baroque’ is a word which all music students are familiar with. Indeed, even since Mr. Todd’s school days have teachers introduced a music history course centered on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the definition of barocco. Literally taken, it means ‘a deformed pearl’. It wasn’t something anyone in the eighteenth century wanted attributed to their work either, but, though I dare not shout too loud, I believe there is something to be learned about ourselves from it.