Well, the way I understand it, the idea of temperment is to adjust the
intervals played on an instrument to be consonant acrross the range of the
instrument, so that, for example, the fifth C-G sounds just as good as C#-G#
and D-A and so on.
Some form of temperment is necessary for instruments like viols and klaviers
since "what you play is what you get", that is, the player cannot microtonally
adjust the notes to be in tune.
Now, violins (as distinct from viols, which have frets) and singer can
adjust
their notes ad. lib. to form consonances. A well trained a capella choir can
sound very nice indeed if they are aware of the difference between a perfect
fifth and a well-tempered fifth. It makes quite a difference!
In fact, when I was in an early music group our music director spent a lot
of
time training us OUT of singing with equal temperment.
So, what's my point here? I claim that any music with more than one note at a
time *can* use equal temperment. Certainly when I sang with a traditional
choir+orchestra we did. But if the ensemble consists *solely* of instruments
(including (possibly) singers, the voice *is* an instrument and singers *can*
be musicians) which have "infinitely" variable pitch, then they CAN use
perfect
intervals, and C# will NOT be the same as Db.
This leads me to wonder if string quartets stick to well- or equal-tempered
intonation or if they make the intervals perfect? If the latter is true, this
may be why I found string quartet music "odd" the first time I heard it, being
used to equal-tempered sounds.
> Surely there was choral harmony before equal temperment.
Exactly what I was trying to say before.
This discussion is wandering away from Jazz -- Reed, should we continue?
--berry
Berry Kercheval :: kerch@parc.xerox.com :: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center