On Jan 14, 2009, at 12:36 PM, A440A at aol.com wrote: > Greetings, > I disagree. Montal's instructions come under "How to tune your own > piano". How many amatuers could tune ET with any kind of instruction? Don't be misled by the book's title. I had low expectations based on the title myself (when I got a copy to research Montal's invention of the sostenuto). But then I was amazed at the quality of his writing. This is obviously someone who has been teaching, successfully, for a long time, and knows how. It is aimed at a very professional level, and though it comes from a very basic perspective, accessible to anyone with a minor degree of musical knowledge, it arrives at very complex details. >snip< > it is doubtful that Montal's influence was all that > widespread. His book is rare, mention of his work is scant, (so far > as I have been able > to Google). In comparison, Thomas Young was well enough known, in a > variety > of fields, to have been able to present his temperament to the > Royal Academy. > When you have entrance to the highest levels like that, I think the > odds > favor wider acceptance, especially since Valotti paved the way. I come to precisely the opposite conclusion of the relative influence of Montal and Young on the practical piano and musical world of the time. Let's start with Young. He was a genius, a polymath, someone who was intellectually successful in many fields. He was a physician and a professor of natural sciences, among other things, and published widely on many topics (Young's modulus is his other contribution to the piano world). His temperament was included in a letter to the Royal Society when he was 29, and the letter was read publicly at a meeting of the society and published in its Philosophical Transactions. So Royal Society members had access, not the general public. Whether or not they paid attention to this contribution by a young member who had not yet made his mark is very much subject to question. Young had no other connections to the musical world, and made no effort to promote his invention. I don't believe there is one iota of evidence that anybody ever tuned an instrument using his temperament until the 20th century. Though Young was well known and respected, it was not for his musical contributions. It was as if Einstein had happened to come up with a temperament scheme. Interesting maybe. Historically significant? Probably not. As for Valotti, he was virtually unknown outside his native Padua. He wrote a treatise toward the end of his life, in which he included his temperament scheme. The volume including his temperament was never published. It was, to the best of our knowledge, next to unknown to the musical world (there is a single reference in print) until the 20th century, when someone came across it and noted his temperament's similarity to Young's. I think it is obvious that he did not pave the way for Young. Valotti's and Young's contributions are mostly an artifact of the 20th century. That is, they were "discovered" in the 20th century and popularized then. They are very neat and symmetrical, and easy to tune and to learn and remember (though I have trouble remembering that Young starts at C while Valotti starts at F - I think <G>. They are different in being a 5th apart). If they have any historical validity, in terms of evidence that they were used during the late 18th and 19th centuries, I would be most interested in reading that evidence. See http://music.cwru.edu/duffin/Vallotti/T1/page2.html (and the other pages of the document) for additional information about Valotti and Young. Montal, on the other hand, was not only the most prominent tuner in Paris during his time, he was a prolific teacher of tuners and a teacher of teachers of tuning. He created the field of piano tuning education in the School for the Blind, and when he left it to pursue other things (like piano manufacture), his students took over. His book no doubt became rare. Of course it would. It was out of date. It deals with the repairs of the pianos of his day, the pianos with bichords throughout, and all sorts of action that became obsolete. But it was originally printed/published for a wide distribution: you can tell by the quality of print, by the quality of engravings (many fine illustrations), by the extra trouble of including well rendered musical examples and mathematical formulae (in the section on acoustical theory), by its size (260 pages). This was not a mere pamphlet, it was a solid book that no publisher would put out unless a large market was anticipated. Too much of an investment up front. It is very hard to come up with reliable information about things like how many copies were printed, and how widely it was distributed at the time. Remember, we are talking about a book about piano tuning and repair. Try and find out the same sort of thing about Braid White's book today in a google search. > > Another consideration is that Chopin's attachment to his favorite > tuner > argues against there being ET involved, since ET is ET and if it was > so > widespread, Chopin could have easily found another tuner to tune the > same way. I'm with Alan Eder on this. There are lots of reasons to prefer a particular tuner/tech, and I think temperament used would be at least 4th or 5th on the list, after clean and solid unisons, voicing and regulation ability, personality, ability to deal with problems efficiently and the like. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu
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