majnuunNavid
Oud Junkie
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Registered: 7-22-2013
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What temperament do you use?
Hello everyone,
Here's an article about a topic that everyone listening and playing music of any kind should know and learn about. It is about equal temperament. I
would be pleased to hear others' experience playing with instruments that are in equal temperament. What are your thoughts on temperament specifically
for Arabic, Turkish, and Persian music?
http://www.oudforguitarists.com/pianos-are-out-of-tune-equal-temper...
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jdowning
Oud Junkie
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Location: Ontario, Canada
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I am not sure if temperament would apply to fretless monophonic instruments like the oud any more than it would to a singer or a Western brass
instrument player or violinist for example where the performer has the ability to instantly adjust the pitch of a note - by ear - to be perfectly in
tune with other singers or instrumentalists.
Western fretted instruments like the lute - played poly phonically, each fret position being shared over several individual strings - were of
necessity tuned essentially in equal temperament with some fine tuning available by virtue of tied on frets that might be moved and adjusted to
obtain optimum tuning over the range of the instrument. I adjust the frets of my lutes so that the strings sound in tune no matter what chord
combination are being played - a compromise that works because the sustained sound of a lute dies quite quickly.
Not so for instruments such as organ or harpsichord for example where each pipe or string is tuned to a fixed pitch and where any dissonance between
sustained notes can become obvious. Early tuning of these instruments (and there were many variations) concentrated on obtaining purity of tone for
certain intervals at the expense of others. This restricted modulation (key change) to about six key signatures that sounded well to the human ear but
anything outside these keys sounded pretty bad particularly for long sustained notes. Some keyboard composers of the 17th C deliberately took
advantage of this dissonance in their compositions for dramatic effect.
Keyboard instrumentalists today that perform on historical replicas will usually tune their instruments the old way to get the best out of the early
compositions in performance.
The historical 'watershed' for a move over to equal temperament for keyboards came during the mid 18th C with J.S. Bach and his 'Well Tempered
Keyboard' compositions that set out to demonstrate that equal temperament tuning with all of its intervals slightly out of tune (except for the
octaves) didn't sound so bad after all and simplified the tuning procedure somewhat. Piano tuners today may obtain the optimum pitch between intervals
in equal temperament by listening to the relative dissonance of two notes played together - evident in the number of 'beats per second' that sound.
For middle eastern instruments it would be interesting to know if players of the fretted instruments (including the early fretted oud) might need to
apply temperament to determine fret placement (although I doubt if they would given a monophonic style of performance)?
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hartun
Oud Junkie
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Registered: 12-26-2012
Location: Detroit, Michigan
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the turkish system seems to be the same as just intonation essentially am I right? And I think that in the 19th century the Turkish and Arabic systems
were all the same. I don't know much about this I am interested to see what others think.
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Brian Prunka
Oud Junkie
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"Well-tempered" is not the same as equal-tempered. Equal temperament didn't really begin to be used regularly until around Beethoven's time (fretted
instruments excepted).
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jdowning
Oud Junkie
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Thank you Brian - I stand corrected. 'Well tempered' keyboard instrument tuning, in all of its manifestations, is not quite the same as (12 tone)
'equal' temperament tuning. However, both systems achieve the same objective which is to sound reasonably well in all of the major and minor key
signatures.
Although equal temperament tuning was known in the 18th C it was not generally accepted until later.
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