Change History
Don't understand seventh chords? Need some tricks for learning key signatures? Post your questions here, or see if you can answer someone else's question.
Changed By: k
Change Date: June 16, 2018 08:03PM
Re: Keys of the Well-Tempered Clavier
I see, so that goes back to temperament, and it sounds like what Bach played is probably not what we hear today because our pianos are tuned equal tempered. Either way, Bach only had organs and harpsichords, so he'd probably be intrigued by what he'd hear today with our modern iron framed pianos and all these years tweaking scale design. So that debate is will probably never be settled, and to me it's interesting but not the part of music theory that I'm trying to sort out.
I'm starting to understand key a little bit more and have read some articles about stretch tuning on a piano, but honestly, I have a hard time hearing the difference between temperaments, let alone the smaller tweaks done for stretch tuning, so let me frame my questions in the context of having no timbre and tuning effects to deal with to confuse the situation.
So, if you're going to write a piece that changes key by more than a few half steps, maybe you want to start between D4 and G4, so you don't end up on D3 for the majority of your tune, if you had started in the key of C at C4. Is that something a composer objectively thinks about?
I've read people saymentioning that some keys have are associated with some different feeling emotions (if we exclude timbre again), could it be that they are also inadvertently starting in a differ mode at the same key as well, i.e. Dorian (C major) vs Aeolian (A Minor).? I guess I'm going off topic, but to me, it's the same question. Maybe they can play faster in some key signatures?
Original Message
Author: k
Date: June 16, 2018 08:00PM
Re: Keys of the Well-Tempered Clavier
I see, so that goes back to temperament, and it sounds like what Bach played is probably not what we hear today because our pianos are tuned equal tempered. Either way, Bach only had organs and harpsichords, so he'd probably be intrigued by what he'd hear today with our modern iron framed pianos and all these years tweaking scale design. So that debate is will probably never be settled, and to me it's interesting but not the part of music theory that I'm trying to sort out.
I'm starting to understand key a little bit more and have read some articles about stretch tuning on a piano, but honestly, I have a hard time hearing the difference between temperaments, let alone the smaller tweaks done for stretch tuning, so let me frame my questions in the context of having no timbre and tuning effects to deal with to confuse the situation.
So, if you're going to write a piece that changes key by more than a few half steps, maybe you want to start between D4 and G4, so you don't end up on D3 for the majority of your tune, if you had started in the key of C at C4. Is that something a composer objectively thinks about?
I've read people saying that some keys have are associated with some different feeling (if we exclude timbre again), could it be that they are also inadvertently starting in a differ mode at the same key as well, i.e. Dorian (C major) vs Aeolian (A Minor).