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my understanding is that equal temperment spread as a tuning system alongside the breakdown of the older court/church patronage system (bach was still a part of that...but these breakdowns are spatially and temporally dispersed even as historians [whom i know about] like to write in ways that amount to that line from virginia woolf [which i paraphrase]--on june 14 1910, as x descended from a train [or something else], everything changed.)
that meant you as a composer wouldn't be working with the same groups of musicians over extended periods, so this continuo business, which was the practice, became a problem.
it's also connected to the development of the piano in it's more-or-less modern form.
and it's linked to changes in how detailed scores came to be (which links to the above, but isn't the same).
so alot of this gets pegged to beethoven, whose work marks the far side of all this, the point at which these diffuse, gradual processes give way to something else.
i like the musical offering though. i think it's interesting to listen to, interesting to look at.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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