Over the past couple months, I have done quite a lot of research on tuning history. Among other things I came across a reference to an article by a scholar named Thomas McGeary. Our library doesn't have the Journal of the American Musical Society, where the article appeared, but one of the perks of the caut job is full access to interlibrary loan services. I requested the article a week ago, and yesterday a photocopy appeared in my mailbox. The article is a survey of practical tuning instructions published in German between 1770 and 1840, and was published in 1989. McGeary says he focused entirely on tuning instructions rather than theoretical writings in order to get at what practical musicians were likely to have done. The article makes clear that equal temperament was by far the dominant method of tuning during that period in German-speaking Europe, the only well-known variant being Kirnberger II, a crude and unattractive tuning system that seems to have been discussed more than it was actually used. [Essentially, it has 10 just 5ths and two 5ths that share the comma: VERY narrow. Those two 5ths are GD and DA, hence very prominent in the tuning. There are three just M3s, two intermediate M3s, remainder are "Pythagorean" (wider than ET). Two of the triads containing the just M3s also have the 1/5 comma 5ths, hence the sound is rather bizarre - sounds horribly out of tune to me. K II was the first historical temperament I tried. Haven't touched it since.] Of 22 total sources studied, fully 14 describe only equal temperament, four offer variants of Kirnberger II, and two have both equal and Kirnberger. The remaining two offer tuning methods that were obscure in their time and remain so today (one of them featured just fifths in the natural keys, tempered in the sharps, yielding a “reverse well temperament”). Of the 12 examples published after 1800, 10 describe only equal temperament, one mentions Kirnberger II along with equal temperament, and one offers an obscure, idiosyncratic system, unrelated to any other. McGeary, Thomas. "German-Austrian keyboard temperaments and tuning methods, 1770- 1840: Evidence from Contemporary Sources”. Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society 25 (1989), pp. 90 -116. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico
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