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Okay, now that I have the first fail post on 3Speak done... this was the post that I had actually tried to make yesterday!

So, the harpsichord is mostly tuned (both 8 feet sets but NOT the 4 foot set... because I'm lazy) at A=415Hz pitch and Werckmeister temperament.

Just as a quick explainer of those terms. Pitch is the absolute position of the reference note... in this case, it is the "A" above middle C, and for modern Baroque performances, it is standardised to be at A=415Hz for most music of that era which corresponds to a modern A-flat (for reference, modern pitch is at around A=440-445Hz). Of course, at that time... there was little standardisation across Europe. Local areas would tune to the main organ in the region which made for a hodgepodge of pitches... which was okay for strings, but a nightmare for wind instruments. As modern equivalents, it would be not unusual to have pitches ranging from A=392Hz (roughly a modern G) through to A=466hz (a modern A-sharp). In addition, due to the fact that pitches/temperament of wind-type instruments were set at construction, it would also not be unusual to have different instruments of different pitches playing in the same piece. Examples of this include Bach cantatas where the wind instrument scores are written in different keys to the strings, and the instruments would be playing at different pitches... but it would end up with everyone playing the same sounding pitches! Anyway, that was pretty much the ethos of the time... just make it work!

Meanwhile, the temperament is how you end up solving the problem of closing the circle of fifths. If you use only perfect fifths to close the circle, you will end up with horrific thirds and be actually unable to close the circle anyway (with the leftover excess being known as the wolf). The way that divide the wolf across the fifths is the temperament, and the different ways that you do it end up with very sweet keys (perfect thirds) and horrific keys (very NOT perfect thirds)... or you can take the modern equal approach, and divide the wolf equally amongst the semitones... leading to NO differentiation between keys. Anyway, in the Baroque and Classical era, the preference was to prefer certain keys and NOT divide the wolf equally.

Blah blah blah... it is sort of normal background knowledge for a Baroque musician, so I'm not going to bore anyone else with weird intricate details of our specialisation of music. Onwards to the music!

Handel was perhaps best known in his time as being a pretty savvy entrepreneur. Sure, he had his hit operas and oratorios... and hte music is pretty damn good (mostly...)... however, it is more than clear that he was always writing in a foreign tongue... which was mostly English, and writing in music that was ultimately derived from the Germanic rhythm of speech. So, you often get hilariously bad accentuation of the spoken phrase in his English arias... kind of like when you hear some-ONE speak-ING with THE wrong em-PHA-sis!

Lascia ch-io pianga is one of his most beloved and famous arias... and it was the same during his own time as well. So, like any savvy businessman... he published the aria in many different forms! This particular form is recreating the aria for keyboard instruments from a collection of Handel "greatest hits" compilation of scores from the Baroque era!

In this particular recording, I was just using a single 8 foot... with no coupling of the keyboards. (Yesterday's fail post was with both 8 foot string sets, and with coupled keyboards). I've only done the first half of the aria... I was only testing to see where the best placement of a recording/video device would be...

... as before, incredibly camera shy... so my avatar will have to stand in for me!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
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