Johannes Brahms composed the HORN TRIO in the spring of 1865. An elegiac mood pervades much of the work. The opening movement is marked Andante. Furthermore, the third movement uses the term mesto, and includes a quotation from “Wer nur den lieben gott lasst walten,” an old German funeral chorale (also used by Bach in his funerary cantata of the same title, BWV 93). It may be that Brahms intended this Trio to serve as a requiem for his mother, as he composed it shortly after her death. There are other aspects to the work as well; the hunt scenes in the finale, and the vigor of the scherzo. The elegiac mood reasserts itself in the trio section of the scherzo. Brahms wrote the horn part for the natural valve-less horn (by then already obsolete). This horn is very difficult to play, since those notes that do not fall into the basic overtone series have to be stopped by hand. That Brahms wrote a virtuosic horn part, on par with the violin, does not make it any easier. The horn used for this trio is usually the modern valve horn, but here it is played on the intended natural horn. The Horn Trio is unique among Brahms’s works, apart from the unusual instrumentation, as it is the only one of his instrumental works which does not employ sonata-allegro form. The form chosen by Brahms instead is comprised of motivic interrelation among the movements, as well as simpler forms.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) inherited a tuning that was “well-tempered,” noted for ease of modulation and for minute but recognizable variations between interval sizes throughout 12 major and 12 minor keys keys. Werckmeister III tuning was the primary embossment on the Baroque, which was to evade the claustrophobic prescriptions of either meantone or other spiraling irregular tunings. The tuning was first published by Andreas Werckmeister in his Orgel-Probe (1681). A MUSICAL OFFERING offers some tantalizing contradictions. Frederick the Great instigated the setting following a desire by the composer to see his newest grandchild. The court under Frederick the Great used utilized an extended sixth comma meantone, and therefore could not play Bach’s music because it required circular well temperament. Bach had only intended it for local consumption, making only100 copies of the work, and distributing them about. These canons were famously solved and published by Bach’s prominent student, Johann Philipp Kirnberger. This music contains rare examples of Bach writing in three parts without a continuo. The particular key of C minor in Werckmeister III tuning offers a sentiment that places each note lower in pitch in comparison to its equal temperament counterparts. In Werckmeister III tuning there are 39 different melodic intervals produced at six cents apart (1200 cents to the octave). The tuning is given below in cents. For more detail see “Bach and Tuning” by Johnny Reinhard available from the AFMM on its website, www.afmm.org Werckmeister Preferred Chromatic (Werckmeister III tuning) C C# D Eb E F F# G G# A Bb B 0 90 192 294 390 498 588 696 792 888 996 1092

PORTRAIT OF IVES Much of the appreciation for Charles Ives (1875-1954) has survived through received wisdom. On many levels, Ives is a great success story. He amassed a personal fortune in life insurance, while leading a determined, non-commercial musical life. He enjoyed a loving marriage, and adopted a daughter. He was a very generous philanthropist. As with any bright light, Ives was smeared by younger stars on the horizon. Aaron Copland, for example, questioned Ives’s ability to edit his compositions. Elliott Carter thought there should be a squelching of any hoopla for the “supposed” Ives innovations. Worse still, the innovator of life insurance’s actuarial tables was described as a cheat by famed Beethoven biographer Maynard Solomon, professionally questioning Ives’s reputation. Ives altered the dates of his compositions, according to Solomon, and these intentional actions drew into question the composer’s seminal position in the American music pantheon (“Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity,” 1986). The motivation accrued to Ives was dishonesty. Former music critic Donal Henahan of The New York Times subsequently revoked the name of Charles Ives as an ideal American composer role model for the nation (“Did Ives Fiddle with the Truth?” February 21, 1988). Soon after, Ives was called a crank, a homophobe, and a sexist. But for musicians who hear a biography in the music composed, there is a disconnect between his accomplishments and the accusations levied against him. Pertaining to re-dating, Ives scholar Carol K. Baron has sufficiently shown the nefarious assertion regarding his altering of dates on his compositions to be without merit (“Dating Charles Ives’s Music: Facts and Fiction,” Baron, Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 28 No. 1, 1990). I have nothing to add regarding this fully exposed misunderstanding with any new reasons or issues since those published by Baron. Carter waited until 1939 to announce his accusations against Ives and published them in the journal Modern Music and in 1969 for the Vivian Perlis oral history project. Rather than jacking up the dissonance, Ives added a whole new dimension to his music by removing temperament altogether for the majority of his music. For example, a harmonic interval notated A-C# is considered dissonant as practiced in Pythagorean tuning during the Middle Ages, and called a ditone (of 408 cents, constructed by ratio 81/64). However, a notated A-Db sounds practically “just” as a major third at 384 cents. Ives indeed did evolve his notation, but purposely, in order to adequately reflect an extended Pythagorean tuning aesthetic (not to impress outsiders as foolishly surmised). Ives indeed changed his accidentals to permit greater clarity of his materials as demonstrated through the results. Apparently, looks can be deceiving. Ives employed an “acoustical plan,” to allow for a whole new transcendental dimension to his music. People invariably ask, “but did Ives really want this change in tuning?!” May I suggest a response at least in part with this Memo of 1923, or soon after, by Ives: The twelve notes in a nice well-tuned piano are ‘twelve notes’ – machine-made almost – but at present the best instrument, that is, the widest sound implement we have, for only one many to use. But the mind, ear, and thought don’t always have to be limited by the ‘twelve’ – for a B# and a C natural are not then the same – a B# may help the ear-mind get higher up the mountain that a C natural always… Some of the chords in this…. I copied out and had played by six violins at Tams, playing in a kind of chord-system made – that is, assuming that a Db was nearer down to C, and that C# was nearer up to D. After the players had sensed this difference in playing the passage – say B B# C, D Db C … to me they usually sounded nearer to each other than a quarter-tone (Ives, Memos, W.W. Norton, New York 1972, pp. 190).