modern ears, historical temperaments

[Dean Reyburn]

>>        I have been watching this list for a while, and  would like to know
>>if there are any practising tuners out there that
>>are using non equal temperaments for modern work.............
>>.....................
>>      I would  like to hear from anybody else that is currently working  on a
>>temperament crusade,  I really think there is more interest in the topic
>> than the current dialogue indicates.
>>regards,
>>Ed Foote

>(With hand waving in the air)........ I am!

>Ironically it seems that wide spread interest in and acceptance or support
>of unequal temperament will not happen among tuners, dealers or
>manufacturers until enough musicians get interested to the degree that they
>request or insist it.
>I say that this is ironic because it was the professional tuners and
>manufacturing industry (not musicians) who motivated the adoption of equal
>temperament on pianos in the first place. Pianists do have rational grounds
>for not dwelling on matters out of their direct control (they have enough
>to worry about), so to me this means that when these musicians do finally
>get more involved and show strong preferential interest in temperament we
>should take that seriously.

>I will also say to those who choose to wait for these requests from
>pianists, that this is expecting a lot initiative from your clients. If you
>understand that it is legitimate, then you should feel obligated to share
>that enlightenment. If you honestly believe that it is not legitimate,
>please don't bother. In that case, go to the library.

>Dennis Johnson

Hi All;

Had to get in my own 2 cents here...  I agree with Dennis, if you want to tune
unequal temperaments, just do it!  Customers will not ask you to do it, few are
informed enough.
       I only occasionally tune unequal temperaments, for my own amazement.
The well temperaments are little much for my modern ear, so I use one of several
of Owen Jorgensen's "quasi-equal" temperaments that were used (according to
Owen) during the transition from Well to Equal temperament.  I tune the
temperament with a Accu-Tuner, and as long as none of the 12 little numbers
(offsets from equal temp) are more than about 2.0 cents off from equal, the
tuning will not be offensive to modern ears.  In fact, the perfect fifth is
theoretically 2.0 cents narrow (-1.955 cents to be exact) in equal temperament,
and a tuning with a few pure fifths sounds really novel to modern ears, so used
are those ears to fifths that wobble a little.

There is a lot more unequal tuning going on out there than most tuners know.
One of the most common uses for my Tuning Manager/Mac/DOS software program is to
convert equal to unequal temperaments.  About 1/3 of my users make use of that
feature.  Admitedly most tuners just dabble in this as I do, but I know, or know
of about half a dozen tuners around the country who tune NOTHING BUT unequal,
usually a variation on Well temperament.  I say unequal not historical, because
there is research still going on in this field, trying to arrive at the
"ultimate" temperament.

Shameless Commercial Message:

The easy & consistant way to do unequal tuning is with an Accu-Tuner, a PC or
Macintosh, and "Tuning Manager" software. TM has all 57 of Owen Jorgensen's
historical temperaments built into the program, or you can add your own!  All
you do is select unequal temperament you want, select the piano make and model,
and send to the Accu-Tuner via MIDI (oh, and tune the piano...).
Demo disks of Tuning Manager are free (if you don't like it use it to backup
your pianotech messages)

End of SCM

For anyone wanting Owen Jorgensen's "Tuning" book, on historical temperaments,
contact MSU Press:

Phone: 517-355-9543          FAX: 1-800-678-2120

Last I checked it was $65


Dean Reyburn

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* Dean L. Reyburn, RPT                                  *
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