When playing in an ensemble, any good player can and must markedly adjust each note to be “in tune”. So however your instrument’s scale has been tuned, much of intonation is the player’s responsibility. (except for certain string instruments that aren’t quickly tunable like piano).
I play in orchestras. There’s a real art to getting woodwind chords tuned, and it’s one of the major challenges. Each member is constantly aware of pitch, and where his/her note needs to fit in. You can’t base your note placement on a tuner, because it will often sound “out of tune” with everyone else. Some of this pitch adjustment is based on knowledge of the chord, but for me, most of it is instinct - getting the sound and feel just right.
Then there are the issues of tuning to the strings…
I can’t get it to open at the moment…but the article “Playing In Tune on a Baroque Flute” is a very interesting read about temperament/tuning issues. http://traverso.baroqueflute.com/
hey james nice job! you pulled together alot of important stuff, seems to explain alot that we experience in our flute journeys. i learned alot - thanks.
I think that is being a bit harsh on Bach et al. Equal temperament scales were a prerequisite to being able to modulate from key to key, and the whole edifice of western classical music (not to mention jazz, pop etc) is built on that foundation.
An interesting point is that modern electronic keyboards have actually given us more, not less flexibility. Many keyboards allow the selection of different scale types (just, mean, pythagorean, quarter tone etc).
Even though we tend to think of celtic dance music as essentially diatonic (ie using the same pitch set throughout), in fact many tunes modulate between major keys. This is particularly the case with hornpipes, which often modulate into the dominant key.
What would also be interesting is to do some measurement of say a vocalist or a solo flute or violin playing a straight air to see whether the natural tendency is to play just or equal-tempered intervals when there is no context of a harmonic accompaniment.
By coincidence I am just reading pioneer folk song collector Cecil J. Sharp’s "English folk song ". When talking about rural singers of the ‘english peasantry’ who were young men in the 1850’s he says
He sings, too, as a rule, with very pure intervals, except when the compass of a song is so wide that he is driven on to the extreme notes of his voice… … many singers take the natural seventh, especially in mixolidian tunes, and the natural third, instead of the corresponding tempered intervals. Folk singers have, no doubt, acquired their vocal skill from constantly singing without accompaniment. The unevenness of tone which mars the vocalisation of all but the very best of singers is directly attributable to the practice of singing habitually with instrumental accompaniment.
Presumably ‘singers’ in the last sentence means trained singers or townies with a piano in the parlor. Elsewhere in the book he argues that the true folk song melodies in England were not as different in terms of modes etc to those in the Celtic regions as many writers thought.
I have just fired up Audacity (free, http://audacity.sourceforge.net ) with the intention of doing exactly that. Not tried the flute yet but it is pretty obvious when a whistle moves in and out of tune with the generated sine wave. Also becoming obvious that my ears are not well trained one way or the other which I hope is not a bad starting point !
List of frequencies anyone ? I think I have seen a table somewhere.
(probably getting ahead of myself, should really be doing long tones, is this a displacement activity ?)
Provided that you are playing a flute in pitched in D (ala Irish flute), begin with a tuning fork, also pitched in D, and treat your ears to that D pitch until you know it well, really, really well.
Then, play that exact tone on your flute. Feel free to strike the tuning fork whenever you wish to check your tuning on the flute. Play it until you have it nailed, perfectly.
Then, using that D pitch as a reference tone, tune all other intervals to that reference pitch. Again, use ONLY that D as a reference, and tune all other tones to it.
Exactly. I’ve played in orchestras where I had to change the pitch of a long held note, because the underlying harmony below it changed. For example, a G# is the third of an E major triad, and so should be played a little lower than tempered to be in tune, but also the fifth of a C# triad, and so shoudl be raised from tempered to be in tune. If you hold that G#, and the other members of an orchestra play first the notes in an E major, and then a C# (either major or minor, it doesn’t matter) chord, you need to change the pitch of the note, even though it is the same written note.
Thanks for the reference tone ideas.
In the context of actually playing in tune (rather than in equal temperament),
it seems the uses of the electronic tuner are rather limited, right?
