Just A Little Musical Detour

 Direct link to the youtube

THIS SHOWED UP in the sidebar when I was looking at a Youtube, I listened to it and it was the best and most honest critique of the claims of using "just intonation" in music that I've ever seen.   Tuning and temperament was a huge issue in my brief period of thinking I wanted to go into musicology, being interested in the late medieval, early renaissance music at that  time.  While I knew enough math to understand that my ears weren't deceiving me and that the claims made about the use of so-called pure intervals was impossible to apply to the music in discussion, it was the sheer nastiness of the various factions and the neurotic claims of reproducing anything like "the authentic performance practice" for most of that music that drove me to concentrate on music from the 20th century.  I have never regretted that decision.

A lot of nonsense still gets said about "pure intervals" - Lou Harrison's writings on the topic are a real mixed bag, not to mention others who are even more out of line with reality.  Some of the composers who make "pure intervals" and the various micro-tuning intervals you have to deal with when you start down that never-ending road have produced interesting music, I'm certainly not opposed to that at all - though lots of it is pretty boring.  But the imposition of that on music of the past as a means of bullying people is ahistorical.  The point in the video that says that there is no historical evidence that they tried much to impose just intonation on musical performance, there is no vocabulary for it or notation for it in the voluminous literature is probably the best one I've ever read or heard in the discussion.

I'm in the process of collaborating with one of my oldest musical friends on some didactic materials, I was hesitating over a point of which tuning to use - he wanted to just go with equal temper and be done with the question, I was worried about that leading to criticism.   I will call him today and tell him that he was right, the critics be damned.   I think that's one of the things that was most damaging to me in my university years, listening to the critics, damn them and their ridiculous pretenses all.