Dictionary of Music - Birding America

424 Telemann, Georg Philippbased on the Gregorian chant for this hymn, somefor organ, have been written since the Middle Ages.From the seventeenth century on, settings for voicesand orchestra were written to celebrate various secular(nonreligious) occasions having nothing to dowith the church, such as Handel’s Utrecht Te Deum,to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht concluded in 1713,and his Dettingen Te Deum, to celebrate a battlewon in Dettingen in 1743. Other settings have beencomposed by Berlioz, Bruckner, Dvořák, Verdi, Sullivan(for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee),Vaughan Williams (for the coronation of KingGeorge VI of Great Britain), Kodály, Britten (two,1935, 1945), Walton (for the coronation of QueenElizabeth II), Persichetti (1964), Penderecki (inhonor of Pope John Paul II), and Arvo Pärt (1985;rev. 1992).Telemann (tā′le män), Georg Philipp (gā′orkfēl′ip), 1681–1767. A German composer andorganist whose works bridge the late baroque styleand early classicism (see PRECLASSIC). Largely selftaught,Telemann became the most prolific composerof his day, completing several thousand compositionsin just about every form—operas,Passions, oratorios, cantatas, chamber music, organpieces, songs, and orchestral works, including concertosand hundreds of French overtures (see underOVERTURE). His keyboard music in particular, withits simple harmonies and highly ornamentedmelodies, is typical of the GALLANT STYLE. Elementsof Polish and Moravian folk music alsoappear occasionally. Born into an educated upperclassfamily, Telemann studied law at the Universityof Leipzig but soon turned to music full-time andheld a variety of posts, beginning as director of theLeipzig Opera. He also was at the court at Eisenach,where he met J. S. Bach; in 1714 he became the godfatherof Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Telemann alsowas a good friend of Handel and corresponded withhim all his life. In 1712 Telemann became musicdirector in Frankfurt, but in 1721 he moved to Hamburg,where he served for the remainder of his longlife. In addition to composing two cantatas for everySunday, an annual Passion, and numerous oratoriosand other large works for special occasions, Telemann,who by then was considered the best andmost influential German composer of his time, organizedpublic concerts and wrote a number of instructionalbooks on ornamentation, realization of figuredbass, and other aspects of performance practice.After his death he was succeeded by his godson.TelharmoniumMENTS.See under ELECTRONIC INSTRU-temperament The tuning of an instrument, thatis, determining the exact pitches to be sounded.Since pitch depends on frequency (see under SOUNDfor an explanation), differences in tuning are createdby differences in frequency. The most important systemsof temperament that have been used in Western(European and American) music are thePythagorean system, just intonation, the mean-tonesystem, and equal temperament, the last being theone in current use since about 1800. In the currentsystem (EQUAL TEMPERAMENT), the octave isdivided into twelve equal parts, so that the distancebetween each half tone and the next (C and C-sharp,C-sharp and D, D and D-sharp, etc.) is exactly thesame in terms of frequency. For convenience, a unitof measure called the cent is used; an octave contains1,200 cents, each half-tone interval containing100 cents. The system of MEAN-TONE TEMPERA-MENT, which preceded equal temperament and wasused mainly for keyboard instruments, was a compromisebetween Pythagorean tuning and just intonation.For instance, its fifth (distance from C to Gin the key of C, for example), contains 697 cents, asopposed to the fifth of 702 cents in Pythagorean tuningand the 700 cents of equal temperament. Themean-tone system worked fairly well for the keyboardmusic of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries,which used mostly keys with fewer than three sharpsor flats, but in more complex keys (three accidentalsor more) it resulted in music badly out of tune. Thesystem of JUST INTONATION, based on the harmonicseries, required new tuning for almost every changeof key. The Pythagorean system (see PYTHAGOREANTUNING), in which all the other intervals are derivedfrom a single one, the perfect fifth, did not work forenharmonic tones (C-sharp and D-flat, for example;see ENHARMONIC). Although equal temperament isslightly inexact for all intervals except the octave,