Introduction Ross W. Duffin (bio) I want to thank BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute editor Christina Fuhrmann for the invitation to explore tuning and temperament in these pages. When she first invited me to guest-edit an issue on the subject, I confess I thought I had already said what I wanted to say about historical tuning.1 But the opportunity to address one of the more controversial aspects of J. S. Bach performance, bringing together both scholars and performers to write for the journal, was ultimately too tempting to let pass. Among the authors here are some who have written books and articles on baroque music in general, or on historical tuning in particular. Two are known for their own temperament designs, widely used in the performance of baroque music today. Others are performers at the highest level who have never written about this before, and who share their own personal approaches to tuning in the performance of Bach's music. Rich and varied as it is, this collection will not be the last word on tuning and temperament in Bach. It should, however, advance the discussion, and allow people interested in Bach to understand the issues, the evidence, and the choices facing performers, in both Bach's time and our own. Thankfully, we are beyond the point of thinking that Bach's term Wohltemperirte meant (and means) equal temperament, with twelve equally tempered fifths around the circle, and twelve equally spaced semitones to the octave. But the task remains to figure out what keyboard temperament(s) Bach might have used, based on a variety of evidence, and what choices might be made by performers today to serve Bach's music in the best way possible. [End Page 143] Anyone unfamiliar with this subject should be advised that this has been one of the most contentious areas of Bach scholarship for many years, and particularly over the last twenty. There are people who think, on the basis of my own writings, for example, that I am the devil incarnate, and others who have told me that I changed their lives for the better. No doubt, reactions to this volume will be just as strong, though we have done our best to ensure that the arguments are evidence based and do not indulge in ad hominem attacks on those with contrary views.2 In that, at least, I think we have succeeded. Temperament is a personal choice for performers. I know organists who grew up playing instruments in equal temperament, and for them, anything else is out of tune. They do not hear the more euphonious major thirds of many baroque tuning systems as better; indeed, the constant "shimmer," or "jangle," of equal temperament's wide major thirds is a sound that they actually prefer, and miss when it is absent. No amount of historical evidence is going to convince them that an unequal "Bach temperament" might be the first choice for Bach's music. One of my former students, a brilliant scholar and player with a strong preference for equal temperament, wrote an essay in which he asked, rhetorically: Is there any reason to believe that Bach preferred C major and F major and G major and the other keys which his alleged temperament favors? I don't think so. Is there anything about his compositions in "faraway" keys which suggests that they should not sound as "pure and agreeable" as the simpler keys? Certainly not.3 This argument stems from Bach's choice to compose two cycles of Preludes and Fugues in twenty-four keys—the Well-Tempered Clavier Books I and II. If Bach composed in C-sharp major, surely he wanted it to sound good—as good as his music in more oft-used keys. While everyone is entitled to personal preference in tuning, there are some things that argue against that approach, in my view. One is that the use of irregular keyboard temperaments imparts highly distinctive characteristics to different keys, mostly because the specific intervals of their harmonies are different from key to key, and [End Page 144] this is a feature that eighteenth-century musicians and listeners came to appreciate. The...

Category	Quartile
艺术学	4
艺术学, 音乐	4

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