Hi,Richard
I don't think of Kellner's temperament as "for
Bach only". I use it on many of the pianos I tune, half
or more. What I almost never tune is equal temperament.
Sometimes I tune mild or 'victorian' well temperament,
and sometimes I tune 1/7 syntonic comma meantone, or a
'stronger' meantone, when the client requests it (which
some of them do!).
Think of it this way:We were educated to believe
that J.S.Bach invented equal temperament and everybody's
used it ever since. So,now that we have a good idea of
what he did intend as the temperament of the WTC, what
could be more appropriate than using that temperament
as the general purpose temperament, the 'default'
temperament, if you will?
The "right" temperament (and tuning,
but one thing at a time...) has more to do with the
emotional temperament of the pianist than with the era in
which the music was written. Werckmeister is credited as
the first to describe well temperament; it's not so
commonly recognized that he also described modified(ie,
'split the wolf' between G#-Eb and Eb-Bb) meantone; and
something very similar to "victorian'well temperament.
When we hear the objection that "if you don't
tune equal temperament, then you have to re-tune for
every key", we are hearing the suggestion that every
piece is really in the key of C, but if it happens to
be notated in some other key signature, then we should
re-tune the instrument so that (for instance) C will
be transposed to Ab (or whatever). This misses the point
of harmony altogether.
Paul Bailey
-------------------------
you wrote...
>Hi Paul
> I just got your snail letter....In Regards to the
>Elaisson /qbasic program, .....your data from your spread
>sheet venue appears to agree with Elaisson's data from both
>the BASIC and pascal programs that he wrote, and also my
>data from a Microsoft Works spread sheet program for W95.
> Now to tune, and even if I did, I don't know
>enough Bach and would have to relearn what I did know .....
>Richard
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