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St Bavokerk tuning

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JulianMoney-Kyrle

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St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 11:44 am

I have just bought the St. Bavokerk Haarlem set, and my initial impressions of it are very positive. However, I was surprised to find that by default it is tuned to equal temperament and there is no option for "original organ tuning". On further investigation it seems that the organ itself was retuned to equal temperament when it was restored by Marcussen in about 1960 so that it can be used for playing more modern music.

I am sure that, like most historic organs, it has gone through a number of changes in temperament over the years, but as this is something that has a major effect on the character of an instrument I would be interested to see how it sounds with some of the earlier tunings, if I knew what they were. I appreciate that in its current state it is voiced with equal temperament in mind, but nevertheless I would prefer to try out something that might be a bit more authentic than simply randomly changing the temperament.

Can anybody point me in the right direction here?
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Grant_Youngman

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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 12:05 pm

I have no idea what the most authentic "original" temperament might be (maybe some variety of mean tone tuning) but you can certainly experiment by loading any other temperaments you have available from other instruments …
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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 1:20 pm

JulianMoney-Kyrle wrote:I have just bought the St. Bavokerk Haarlem set, and my initial impressions of it are very positive. However, I was surprised to find that by default it is tuned to equal temperament and there is no option for "original organ tuning".


You can download the Lehmann-Bach Temperament from Pipeloops:
http://www.pipeloops.com/information.php?info_id=5

This gentle temperament can be played in any key, and never calls attention to itself. It gives any Organ Sample Set a much more lifelike feel than Equal Temperament. I use it for all of my Sample Sets which come with Equal Temperament as their default. Easy to try... free download!
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david515mi

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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 2:49 pm

When I bought the set, I became curious about the original temperament. I think I read somewhere that it was retuned to equal sometime in the late 18th century, but I might be wrong. At any rate, I posted the question in a FB group, and received a response from Ibo Ortgies, who has made research on temperament his life’s work. His research has led him to the conclusion that quarter-comma meantone (which has eight pure thirds) was pretty much without exception the tuning used in North Germany and the Netherlands during the 17th and first half of the 18th century; he believes that modified meantone and well-tempered tunings were largely "on paper", not being used very much in practice (but more so in Central Germany). This contradicts conclusions reached by Harald Vogel and Kerala Snyder about the instruments Buxtehude played in the Lübeck Marienkirche. But not to digress further, his answer to my question about the Bavokerk’s original tuning was "almost certainly quarter-comma meantone." Of course if it were tuned that way now, we couldn’t play most Bach works, and those of later composers on it, I tend to choose some kind of well-temperament on it most of the time- eg Lehman as mentioned above. I hope this helps.

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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 3:02 pm

Inspired Acoustics have some temprament packs available (free!). Go to IA/free bits/extensions.
There's plenty there to play with!
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mnailor

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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 5:13 pm

A lot of the period music can be played on quarter comma meantone, including probably a majority of Bach, but even some of Buxtehude's works break with 3 flats or 4 sharps. So 1/4 comma MT is somewhat limiting, though the pure thirds are wonderful in the right keys (while the fifths almost grate to my ear).

Luckily, we can change temperaments for each piece if we wish.

6th comma meantone was certainly used on organs when this was built -- even if not used commonly in the same region -- as were some other modified meantone temperaments. 1/6 comma MT gets wolfy too, but it's a little more flexible.

Neidhardt II is a decent compromise if you get tired of working around meantone variants, and at least it was documented at the time as an organ temperament.

Lehman might be a Bach temperament, from an interesting plausibility argument about WTC squiggles, but wasn't used to tune organs as far as any evidence shows. It makes sense for a harpsichord or clavichord.
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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 5:44 pm

Thank-you, everyone, for your thoughts, particularly David Enos, as his answer really addresses the question that I had in mind.

I already have a wide variety of temperaments installed, including the Bach-Lehman temperament and the ones from Inspired Acoustics (which have names that don't really explain what they are terribly well).

My understanding is that the Bach-Lehman temperament is thought to be one that Bach came up with and that he used to use to tune harpsichords, clavichords etc. before playing them. It doesn't seem very likely, to me, that he would be the person tuning an organ, however, and that the tuners would use the system that they were familiar with.

Far from Bach being unplayable with a meantone temperament, I wonder if he actually wrote to take advantage of the apparent shortcomings. A few years ago I experimented with different tunings for the Toccata in F, and with one of the mean-tone systems (I forget which one) things started to get really interesting. After the initial canonical section and the pedal solos the middle section alternates between a few bars big chords with key changes and a tricky piece of triple counterpoint. At the end of each of these subsections there are a few bars starting with a kind of B-A-C-H motif and then then some figuration around the same chord repeated at different octaves. Each time it gets further from the home key (i.e. with more flats) and therefore more out of tune, setting up a feeling of tension, and each time it resolves back into the home key, with the tension easing. Finally, in the coda, the B-A-C-H motif is heard again, but now it goes so far from F that the harmonies are quite jarring, before modulating back to F for the final bars bringing an enormous sense of relief. With equal temperament, or any "well-tempered" tuning, this doesn't work. I am not a musicologist or a Bach scholar, so I might have completely got hold of the wrong end of the stick here, but to me it seems as if Bach, who knew more about how to write for the organ than anbybody else before or since, could take the shortcomings of an instrument and turn them into strengths.

It is also quite fun to try this with Hindemith, though not if anybody else is listening.

While it is the case that Bach's music works almost no matter how you play it, and on what instrument, there is no doubt that he really knew how to exploit the individual characteristics of whatever he was writing for, and not just the organ.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about temperaments to know how they differ technically, or indeed which ones are historically correct (to the extent that there is such a thing) in which circumstances. However, it is clear that changing the tuning can completely alter the sound of an organ, and this is an area where I would love to know more.

I will try fourth-comma meantone with Haarlem as a starting point and see to what extent it works, though if Marcussen voiced it with equal temperament in mind I don't suppose the result will be completely satisfactory. More generally, I mostly like to play an instrument with Hauptwerk set to the original organ tuning, providing that this doesn't mean that it isn't very well in tune.

I should add that my criterion for judging any musical performance is that it should be convincing, not that it should be "correct". If I am constantly annoyed while I am listening because something feels as if it should be played a different way, then the performance fails, but if it is showing me something about the music that I had never noticed before, and everything works together, then the performance is a success. However, I do think it is best important to understand the context of a piece, at least as a starting point, in order to play it well.

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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 6:30 pm

Re the Toccata in F: yes, the end, to my ears, is kind of bland in equal temperament, once you get used to the excitement unequal systems bring. Back when the piece was in my repertoire, the instrument at my church was in Kirnberger III, and I thought the last couple of lines had the most wonderful intensity imaginable!
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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 7:17 pm

I've just tried to play the prelude and fugue in A minor, BWV 543, on Haarlem using quarter-comma meantone. The long reverberation coupled with clashing intervals sounded like a not very well-tuned peal of bells. The effect was awful. I think I will have to experiment with something a bit less extreme. Meanwhile I am wondering what organ music must have sounded like in Bach's day if this system was used so extensively. Though I don't really know much about how Thuringian organs were tuned, either.
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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostSun Sep 13, 2020 7:28 pm

According to Ortgies, there’s still much that’s unknown about the temperament of Thuringian organs. The Trost organ at Waltershausen and its sample set are in a 5th-comma modified meantone, and I haven’t detected any hideous problems when playing Bach on it (including the A minor). I don’t know for sure whether that’s the original tuning, but it doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostMon Sep 14, 2020 6:29 am

PhD musicologist here, for whatever that's worth, although not a temperament specialist; in fact I find the subject very dreary.

But - for what it's worth - a very important point is Julian Money-Kyrle's, that the organ builders had their own temperaments, and most of the discussion we see was for stringed keyboard instruments. There are a few exceptions such as Werckmeister, but he spent some time lamenting the fact that he couldn't get any builders to adopt his proposals (some of which were rather stupid).

Some random points. Bradley Lehman's temperament met with a lot of skepticism by temperamenters when first introduced, and has now by totally discarded. Here's one refutation: https://my.ptg.org/blogs/fred-sturm/2014/10/24/lehman-bach-tuning-refuted. It doesn't sound very good to me; it favors the flat keys over the sharps, but every known Baroque temperament (except equal) does the opposite. The final nail in the coffin was that Andreas Sparschuh, who had made the original suggestion that the squiggle on the manuscript of the Well-Tempered Clavier represented a temperament, finally admitted that he had intended it as a joke.

We know that Bach didn't use meantone temperament at Leipzig. There is the anecdote about him torturing Silbermann by playing a long chord on one of his instruments until Silbermann couldn't stand it any longer. Also, and less anecdotally, organs were typically tuned a tone higher than other instruments. Many organs had a gedackt or two at the lower pitch for continuo use, but the organ at Thomaskirche didn't, and Bach had transposing parts for the organist copied out. So there must have been something vaguely approaching equal temperament there. Of course, most of Bach's surviving organ music predates his Leipzig career.

We just don't know about Buxtehude. Based on Ibo Ortgies' research, Kerala Snyder withdrew her suggestion that he would have used something like Werckmeister III. Many mean-tone organs were fitted with split sharps, so that you had two different keys available for, typically, d-sharp/e-flat and g-sharp/a-flat, but the organs at Lübeck didn't. It's possible that Bux's organ works weren't intended for the organ, but as sort of study pieces that were played, if at all, on the (pedal) clavichord. There's the even worse possibility that the problematic pieces, or at least the problematic sections, weren't written by Bux at all, but by some organists in central Germany a generation later, since that's where the sources come from.
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JulianMoney-Kyrle

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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostMon Sep 14, 2020 9:05 am

Stuart,

Thank-you, that is very interesting. Of course it makes sense that tuning systems for stringed instruments aren't necessarily suitable for organs.

It seems to me that it is desirable to avoid a clash between the harmonic-reinforcing stops and the intervals that are nominally at the same pitch, which leads me to wonder whether an organ builder who uses thirds in the mixtures might favour a different temperament from his rivals who uses only fifths...

Fred Sturm's refutation of Bradley Lehman's temperament seems fairly conclusive. At the start he likens it to the writings of Dan Brown, where his writings about art are superficially plausible but actually wrong. I have enjoyed reading Dan Brown, but my background is science (specifically I am a clinical oncologist, or what would be called a radiation oncologist in the USA), and his description of antimatter in Angels and Demons almost comes into the category of "not even wrong" to quote Wolfgang Pauli. I always assumed that most of the art history was similarly fabricated. One difference between the arts and the sciences is that in science there is much less room for the opinions of academics since the final arbiter of truth is Nature herself.

This still doesn't quite answer my original query of what temperament might be most suitable for playing Bach on the Haarlem organ. The recordings I have of it (such as in Werner Jacob's EMI set of Bach's organ works) show it as it is now, of course, which is with equal temperament, so perhaps I should stick to that. Though I am tempted to continue playing around - having found that 4th comma meantone really doesn't work at all with BWV 543, I was rather surprised that just Pythagorean was much better. But for the 5th Trio Sonata (written in C major and with lots of descending thirds) it is the other way round. Curious!

The 4th comma temperament that I have installed is called MeanToneFourth-commaPietroAaron; I have no idea where it came from, nor if it is correct. The thirds seem to be true, most of the fifths are OK, and with a wolf between G# and D#.

I would also appreciate it if anybody could point me to an explanation of the temperaments offered by Inspired Acoustics as Bach-1, Bach-2 etc. doesn't mean very much to me.

Best Wishes,
Julian
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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostMon Sep 14, 2020 9:45 am

If you download one of the PAB2 manuals, there is a listing of tuning offsets at the end, which should give a bit more info (not much....).
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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostMon Sep 14, 2020 11:05 am

This article gives a quick overview of the history of temperaments to place 1/4 comma meantone in the right time period. By Bach's lifetime, while he may have played or heard older organs with the old temperament, new organs were built (in central Germany) with various modified meantone schemes. For example, Silbermann used 1/6 syntonic comma meantone and modifications of it. Yes, there are some bugs in the article...

https://www.albany.edu/piporg-l/tmprment.html

If Bach had only 1/4 comma meantone to work with, there would be no Ab, Db, D#, A#, or Gb notes in his organ music. They weren't just interesting dissonances; they literally aren't existent notes in that temperament. They aren't close enough to the right notes to fool the ear at all. Okay, maybe for special effects. That's why, by around 1700, organ builders were inventing modified meantone schemes to make more of those notes available.

I don't know that Haarlem was built to play Bach (was his music even used there and then?), and maybe it really was 1/4 comma meantone originally, but there's nothing wrong with picking a more usable temperament for the music you're trying to play.
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Re: St Bavokerk tuning

PostMon Sep 14, 2020 1:04 pm

I think this is a very interesting discussion, and I have been doing some research on temperaments recently I hope to be able to share with this community soon. I just wanted to add my thoughts to this discussion as well.

I agree with others that the original was likely a kind of 1/4 comma meantone, however I also agree that every organ builder had their own temperaments, and they were generally not the strict 1/4 comma, such as the Pietro Aron that comes with Hauptwerk. Even Pietro Aron’s original treatise on the temperament was quite vague, and there are multiple interpretations out there how exactly to tune an instrument using his directions, with some stricter and some softening towards equal. My feeling is that most organ builders would have sharpened both the fifths and thirds slightly to soften it and take a bit of the bite out of the wolf, particularly in Germany, England and Italy. Based on the music written for organs of that period, my feeing is that in France and Spain they would have been a bit more strict during the Baroque, but probably started softening it there too during the classical and romantic period as well. I don't have any experience tuning an organ, but when tuning a piano by ear in 1/4 comma meantone, the fifths sound better if you sharpen them a bit from strict 1/4 comma, and the thirds can get away with quite a bit of sharpness before they start sounding bad.

Given that sharpening the 1/4 comma fifth would push it closer to 1/5 comma or 1/6 comma, this is a place to start. I agree with what has been said that ultimately, it has to sound good to your ears. I personally find that Bach usually sounds pretty good in equal temperament, but I also agree with others that hearing his pieces in some kind of well temperament brings out interesting elements regarding the tension of keys with more beating in the intervals, so I would experiment with both. There has been a lot of discussion as to what temperament exactly Bach used, but softening meantone to make more keys playable as I have described is a definite possibility, and it is easy to do by ear. Remember that as you narrow the syntonic comma by sharpening the thirds and fifths, you eventually arrive at equal temperament.

Marie-Claire Alain recorded Bach's Trio Sonatas on the St. Georgenkirche in Rotha for her third complete Bach cycle, which has a sort of modified meantone Gottfried Silberman temperament, and I think it is hard to beat that particular recording (and the trio sonatas in any case were very well critically received). It is definitely softer than the strict 1/4 comma Pietro Aron. There are also some published Silbermann temperaments that can be tried. I personally think that Silbermann's temperaments sound very good for Bach (and the modern Silbermann recreations seem to be a bit less strict than the previously quoted anecdote seems to suggest).
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