A great microtonal survey
Mark Lindley · Early Music · 2009
After more than 25 years of writing substantial musicological articles in Italian, Patrizio Barbieri has with the help of two translators, Hugh Ward-Perkins and Ken Hurry, given us an anthology of revised versions in English of some of his most important work—a scintillating magnum opus. In routine music-teaching the term ‘enharmonic’ refers to a distinction or sometimes even a physical difference between the sharp and the ‘enharmonically’ equivalent or not equivalent flat (equivalent or not depending on the style of intonation that is used) which are to be found between each pair of naturals a whole-tone apart from each other in the scale (between A and B, between C and D, between D and E, and so on). In the title of this book the meaning of the term is stretched to cover a variety of experimental ‘microtonal’ scales and keyboard-instrument designs from the 16th to 19th centuries. It describes also some historical keyboard tunings which were normal in their day and in which each flat or sharp divides the whole-tone consistently into two unequal semitones, unlike in the normal modern kind of tuning (equal temperament) where the semitones are uniform. It includes information about the gradual historical rise in practical status of equal temperament, but also documentary evidence for the historical use of unequal semitones by singers, violinists et al. This information is of particular interest to me because it has to do with ‘normal’ (as distinct from experimental) music and it cites some sources not mentioned in my ‘Stimmung und Temperatur’ (Geschichte der Musiktheorie, vi (Darmstadt, 1987), pp.109–331). If my essay is ever translated into English, I would like the translator to revise the analogous part of it to include the citations which I did not know about at that time and which Barbieri has so diligently assembled.