Temperament in the 90's

[A440A]

David writes:
 
>I have never tuned anything but ET but I am becoming interested 
>in historical tunings.  My question is do we have more room 
>for errors or fudging on an historical tuning than ET?   
 
     Oh my, yes!!!!  The published temperaments are all results  of
different procedures by various writers,  and the well temperament genre is
interpretive in nature.  Fudging  something in WT does not destroy an
interlocking lattice-work of full octave regularity that ET is.  It just
shifts the balance of color between a few keys..  There are virtually no 20th
century ears around here that could tell the difference between two
Kirnbergers with the E moved a couple of  cents  or so.......  you can hear
that disparity in ET.    

      In the "tune-offs" which Jim and Virgil did,  there were considerable
numbers on each side.  I propose that if either of these gentlemen had tuned
both pianos, the audience of techs would still split in a not dissimilar
fashion.  
        This is not to detract from either of them,  Jim was giving tuning
lectures when I was still trying to figure out guitar chords to Beatle songs,
and any aural tuner tuner(Virgil) that can be competitive with such a
carefully and electronically guided Coleman tuning is head and shoulders above
the vast majority of tuners I have known.  
 
    The difference between virtually any of Jorgensen's WT's and ET are so far
greater than the differences that we could accept between two  different techs
"equal temperaments" that I am not really sure why we want to draw parallels.
Equal temperament is a specific construction, Well Temperaments are a genre.  
Susan writes: 
>It was a Jim vs. Jim tuneoff,
>with a pure 5ths temperament on one piano, and a "more conventional >tuning"
on the other. A whole roomful of tuners (apparently) didn't >realize that the
second piano was tuned to a well temperament, even >when they were carefully
listening for differences in tuning.  

       With the above in mind, there is little point (IMHO) in discussing the
differences that can realistically be expected to exist is different ET
tunings,  I just don't think they are large enough for an audience to be moved
one way or the other  by them. however....... if we want to talk about the
musical qualities of the Well Temperaments,  we have to listen to the same
thing.  Somebody want to talk about the "musical quality" of a 21.5 cent third
on a Steinway D?   A big reason for the "Beethoven In The Temperaments" CD was
to have something out there that provided a  concrete artifact about which we
could exhibit our perceptions concerning tonality.  I posted the address here
earlier, and will do so again if there is enough interest.  
      Beethoven  shows one way to use this highly tempered interval in the
"Pathetique".  That was one reason we began our  CD with this piece in a
Kirnberger III,( which has a full comma in the key of Ab).  I will be real
curious to find out if the rest of the world reacts to the differences.  
       
     The progress of tuning awareness is in the hands of the technicians
today.  No matter what the theorists or  performers think or desire,  if there
is no craftsperson/artist/technician around to tune that Werckmiester,  the
WTC will just have to suffer getting its color washed away.  It is going to be
up to the technicians at large to make a larger use of WT feasible, and we
won't do it in large numbers until there is money in it.  
     If temperament awareness increases, the tech that can tune several
different temperaments will be more valuable than the tech that can only tune
one style of tuning.   For those of us around classical venues, the ability to
handle the different temperaments just might become an asset.  Possession of a
SAT or RCT makes it as simple as any other tuning, but opens up an entirely
new world for the classical piano sonatas.  I have found a lot of customers
that love  the well tempered sound. 
Regards to all, (and ain't it great that after so many decades of
indifference, the topic of temperament is once again active?) 
Ed Foote