Fretting about tuning

Abstract

‘What is the point of having movable frets if you don’t move them? It’s like owning a Ferrari … all its handling capacity and power under the hood are reduced to nothing but unrealized potential.’ Right off in the introduction to Meantone temperaments on lutes and viols David Dolata ignores a cultural law propounded by Curt Sachs around 1930, to wit, things that are technically possible are often not put into practice. In Sachs’s words, ‘the vessel is not filled’. No doubt movable frets can be moved, but this would have left marks on surviving old necks, which is not the case. Dolata deals with his subject in three chapters: historical summary, description of temperaments, and practical and partly useful advice for tuning and care of the instrument. (A word of warning, though: cleaning pegs with nail polish remover may ruin the substance of the wood.) But his arguments stand on feet of clay. Judging from his bibliography, he refers to hardly any sources —and if so, in English translation—but relies on second-hand information. This is particularly problematic in the case of German-language texts, and a brief aside of a native German speaker may be in order here. A significant part of the debate among German scholars is about the meaning of terms: the older the text, the more controversial. Moreover English has about twice as many terms as German, with more precisely defined meanings, whereas German words may comprise various meanings. (For example, there is only one word—‘verachten’—to signify ‘hold in contempt, disdain, loathe, despise, scorn’, so that an ambiguous German text appearing as crystal clear in English is misleading.) Apparently the English-speaking world is under the impression that Arnolt Schlick tuned in 1/6-comma meantone (p.180). The original German permits no such conclusion, leaving aside the question of how such a complicated organ tuning could have been achieved in 1510—in the absence of computers—with nothing but a monochord. By definition, early tunings had to be easy to tune.