Alright, in this little segment we're going to talk about tuning.
What is tuning?
We talked about it a little bit when we talked about how to go to a concert and what to
expect, that the instruments have to tune up.
So, in that respect, when we talk about tuning
what we mean is that we're trying to get everybody on the same pitch.
That's a useful thing if you're going to play in an ensemble.
If you remember when we looked on the inside of the piano and we saw that there were
three strings for every note and that all three strings had to be tuned to each
other, then
that was another example of tuning and why it's important.
When we get in the Baroque Period
we have a major shift
in what happens
with the whole tuning system.
So up to this point
we didn't really talk about scales.
The types of scales that we used prior to about 1600
were called modes
and there were lots of different ones
and basically they were still combinations of notes
but
the tricky thing was that because of the tuning systems that we used back then,
you couldn't just take a mode and move it to another pitch and still
sound the same.
Why was that?
We basically had three kinds of tuning systems going on before 1600.
One of those was called mean tuning and I'm not gonna try to explain any of the details of all
these things to you but
that's one kind of tuning.
There was another system called just intonation which intonation just means tuning
which you can still actually do. That's when... violins can do that, we talked
about how a violin or string players can adjust
a pitch very slightly because they don't have
specific places their fingers have to be.
So in just intonation you can change
a note so if you want it to be a little higher because it's a leading into
something else, you need it to be a little lower, because it's leading down,
you can do that. But string players are the only ones who can really do it, maybe trombone. So we
really don't think about that much as a system.
The third system that was in use at the period of time was called Pythagorean
tuning.
You remember Pythagoras: a(squared) + b(squared) = c(squared).
He was also into
the physics of sound. So in his tuning system,
if you had the note C and the note G, which is what we call a fifth, we talked
about the distance between notes, that's a fifth,
in Pythagorean tuning
the frequency, the hertz we would say now
for G
would be at a 3:2 ratio to C.
So all the fifths would be at a 3:2 ratio
which all sounds lovely and mathematical and perfect
except that what happens
is that by the time you go through the whole tuning thing,
this fifth to that fifth to this fifth to that fifth,
by the time you get to the octave,
it's not an octave any more. It's a little bigger.
So the tuning systems
sort of scientifically made sense but accoustically
did not.
So
that's all gone. So what did we do instead?
When we get to the Baroque Period, we have an entirely new system
that we call
equal
temperament.
Temperament is another word for tuning, so we have intonation, we have temperament,
we have tuning. They all mean
basically the same.
It's how the notes are
in relationship to each other.
So when we get to equal temperament, what that tells us is that now
instead of having these odd relationships where when you get to the octave it's
not an octave anymore,
all the half steps
are exactly the same distance apart.
On our piano, we saw that. The sound is the same. You go from one 1/2 step to another,
it's always the same
distance in sound,
not the same pitches,
just the same distance between them.
So half-steps, whole-steps, that whole concept is really
fairly modern. We're talking only about 400 years old.
So equal temperament;
big big news
musically! It's what we have been using
ever since. Every now and then we have a regression and somebody will say, "Oh I think I'll
go try some modal things for a while,"
and it gives us a different sound, you even hear it in popular music,
but for the most part
equal temperament
is what we now use or sometimes we call it twelve-tone
tuning because it gave us our twelve tones that are equally
spaced.
So what's
really important about equal temperament aside from the fact that now everything
is kind of uniform.
One of the things
that equal temperament allows us to do
is to perform the same piece
in more than one key.
We didn't really talk about keys until we have equal temperament because as
I said
if you change your starting point, you tried to do a mode from another place,
it didn't sound like the same mode. So we don't talk about key until you get to
the Baroque Period.
You start looking at titles of pieces from the Baroque Period, you're going to see key names
everywhere, especially in instrumental music. "Sonata in C minor."
"Suite in G major." It's going to be right there. They're proud of it. This
was new and exciting. They put the key right there for you.
But what it means for us long-term is not only that we're now in a sense of
key but that we can change the key
of a piece.
So suppose that you
are a
lovely high soprano and I am not
but we want to sing the same song, not together,
but you've sung this song, maybe you're famous, I like your song.
I want to sing it but I can't sing as high as you can.
One option would be for me just to take it down an octave and it would be in the same
key
and I could do that, but that would probably be too low for me to sing.
So what I would do instead is to take your great song that I love
and I would transpose it.
We would use transposition;
moving the position,
and I would put it in a different key.
So if you were singing...
we'll take
"Row Row Row Your Boat" because I can use that without having to worry about any
copyright
violations with that right, everybody can do that. So you're a soprano and you sing it...
[high pitch singing]
I can't sing up there!
I'm just going to take it down here!
Row row row your boat gently down the stream...
Same song,
recognizable as the same song,
just starts in a different place,
different key.
Transposition! That's very important! Big thing to remember?
You can't transpose
in the middle of a piece.
You have the piece here, it is in one key,
you have the piece here, and it's in a different key. They're the same piece,
two different keys, just keep them apart.
They don't play together. So transposition does not happen in a
single piece. It's something that happens
after the piece.
So that's one really important thing that we've been using
to great avail ever since. The other big thing that equal temperament
allows us to do
is modulation.
Modulation!
And that is
changing key in the middle of a piece.
It's a really useful tool and you hear it
all the time. Lots of popular music uses it.
You have the verse, you have the chorus, you have the verse, you have the chorus again,
you have a little bridge,
and then they may
kick it up
to a little higher pitched range, change the key
for that last time through the chorus.
Breaks up the sameness of being in the same key.
So that's one of things that
we use quite a lot
that has to do with equal temperament. So you can start in one key
and change to a different key.
The other thing that that allows is
actually sort of continuous modulation.
If you go back and listen to that Bach invention that we used as our example of
polyphonic texture,
remember I talked about,
we had bom pom pom pom pom pom pa nanana
and then we would have pom pom pom pom bom bom bom
we had that same little lick
in lots of different keys.
We weren't transposing because we're still in the same piece,
we're modulating!
We're moving
through. We use modulation in lots of different ways.
In fact, did you know that AM and FM, that's amplitude modulation and frequency
modulation. See we use those terms all the time.
So, modulation allows us to change keys
within a piece and you'll hear it a lot
from here on in, and in Baroque music a lot. It's one of the things they loved to
do, just sort of take the
little theme they've come up with,
move it around,
jump it around,
change it through lots of different keys.
So, we now have equal temperament which means we can now talk about things
being in keys; major keys, minor keys.
We can modulate
and we can transpose and that's a really important thing that we're going
hear
probably forever.
Started in the 1600's.