Quote:
Originally Posted by scotty_b
My understanding is that there was a radical shift under Bach's innovations/adoption of the well-tempered tuning system. Bach demonstrated that modulation was in fact possible between key centres previously deemed impossible. This of course has had a profound impact on everything since.
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Not that radical, Scotty. Yes, the new tuning system meant that all modulations were now possible but musical style still didn't allow you to go modulating all over the place, just because you could.
Also, it's worth remembering that the previous inability to freely modulate because of the old tuning system applied only to instruments of fixed pitch such as keyboards. Singers and players of string instruments always had the ability to modulate to any key, because they could slightly change the pitch of the note to always be in tune in any context. But their repertoire didn't contain wild modulations either, because the accepted style of the day wouldn't have permitted it.
Bach's 48 preludes and fugues showed that you could now play separate pieces in every key on the
same keyboard and you could also become more adventurous in your modulations but it still took time for such modulations to become acceptable.
His son Carl, developed a more ambitious musical form based on a hierarchy of keys with modulations between them, which eventually became
sonata form, a feature of which, the development section, makes a point of wandering through remote keys just for the hell of it.
So it was more of a gradual process, and also an inevitable one. JS Bach wasn't the only composer, or even the first one, to expand the tonal possibilities of the tempered keyboard. It's just that, being Bach, he did it better and more memorably than anyone else.