Always on the lookout for ideas for better tuning of instruments, played alone or in groups, I was very interested to hear about Mr. Jorgensen's tuning handbook from Patricia Grignet Nott during her lecture demonstration of baroque oboes and bassoons at the 1979 IDRS conference last August.
Owen Jorgensen serves on the faculty of Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, where he teaches piano tuning, tunes the concert pianos and performs temperament recitals. One reviewer, John Dwyer, of the Buffalo, New York Evening News describes Jorgensen as "a kind of piano tuner raised to the rare level of scientist, scholar, and tasteful musician."
Spending a few hours experimenting with the thousands of ideas presented by Jorgensen in this very complex text bears out both the terms scientist and artist in good balance.
I would recommend that those members of IDRS who teach at music schools and university music departments have their libraries order this excellent book. It will be useful in at least three areas of study: the piano/ keyboard department, the early music program, the tunable orchestral instrumental department.
The 435-page book fully covers the history of tunings used throughout all stages of the development of instrumental music. Jorgensen clearly explains both the reasons for so many different tunings used and their artistic and musical effectiveness. Space in this publication does not permit a full listing of the chapter contents (there are 31 topic headings in Chapter I for example), but a list of the subjects covered in the book's introduction will be useful:
Most of the readers of this newsletter are not keyboard artists (I am sure that some are). But we all play instruments which tune according to one system or another (woodwinds, strings) and we all face myriad problems of "being in tune". If a non-keyboard instrumental musician just reads through Owen Jorgensen's book without using any of the practical instructions to "find out for himself by ear", such a musician will definitely understand the nature of tuning in a different way from before and in a way beneficial to his or her continued performance in solo or ensemble situations.
To underscore my conviction that this book will be of good practical use to all musicians, not only to keyboard performers, I add here the comments of a brilliant musician, Robert Mann, first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet:
"It is shameful that the majority of performing musicians have not the slightest notion about the serious relationship of tuning and the music created throughout the development of western musical history. Ignorance and misconception is passed on from performer to listener and the profound appreciation of the musical message is diluted. Therefore, the work of Owen Jorgensen is not only fascinating, but vital to the understanding of all music and, in particular, to the music of the past that was conceived in different tunings. I cannot praise his book Tuning the Historical Temperaments by Ear enough and hope that it will be the 'ear-opener' to all musicians as it was to me."