David Runnion <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Steve Schwartz wrote:
>
>>Do you insist on contemporary tuning?
>
>No, because it is impractical and IMHO doesn't make much difference
>anyway. The vast majority of listeners don't know if it is A430 or A450.
>The "spirit" of the music is not affected by the tuning.

Sure it is, if you include "temperament" along with the the reference
frequency of the tuning. Equal temperament sounds significantly different
from "well-tempered" tuning or any number of varieties in between, at
least in many "distant" keys it does.  Note that with temperament you are
talking about altering the relative pitches of the written notes, arguably
a more serious "tinkering" with the score than ignoring the repeat sign.
Suppose it turns out that Bach played the WTC on keyboard instruments
tuned with an unequal temperament of one kind or another, would this
make performances of WTC on even-tempered keyboards a travesty?

>...and repeat marks, to stay on-topic, are very complete and very obvious.
>This idea of "deviation" from the score to achieve an effect that the
>composer doesn't indicate is not to my taste.

But the question is not whether the repeat mark itself is ambiguous, but
whether its meaning is ambiguous.  Suppose we know from historical research
that composer A always insisted on observing his repeat signs (it appears,
from posts in this thread, that Beethoven could have been such a composer),
and composer B often disregarded his repeat marks while performing his own
music (it could be that Mozart was such a composer).  Now suppose you are
performing a work by composer C, on whom historical scholarship is scarce
and there is no consensus on whether he insisted on observing repeats in
his scores or not.  What makes it a sin, then, to adopt a flexibile
attitude towards repeats in C's music?

Ulvi
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