Meantone, my personal adventure

[Jim Coleman, Sr.]

Hi Richard:

You wrote:

> Good, lets get into Meantone.

When I was a boy, my father let me practice temperament until I became
frustrated.

I started tuning pure intervals from C below middle C. I tuned C-E pure,
I tuned C-F pure, I tuned C-G pure, I tuned D-G pure, I tuned D-A pure,
and then it hit me! The F-A 3rd was bad, the E-A 4th was bad. I had not 
yet read anything about Meantone, but it dawned upon me that if I tuned
the E-A 4th pure, then the D-A 5th would sound bad; so, I decided to
split the difference (meantone?) and tune the D flatter so that the
D-A did not sound so bad, but the D-G would then have beats. In essence
I was discovering that you can't have your cake and eat it too, so to speak.
If you rob Peter, you must pay Paul. Equal temperament is the ultimate
compromise, but in the process, much of the beauty of tuning and 
musicality has been lost. We have grown used to it just as the oriental
ear had grown used to the pentatonic scale. We in our western culture think
that the oriental music sounds weird. They probably think our music sounds
weird. It's a matter of background and culture.

Owen Jorgensen and I started out in the adventure of discovering what the
historical musicians were dealing with. We both read James Murray Barbour's
book on the early temperaments. I read it in 1947-9? The difference between
us is that Owen continued to dig through that mine field and document
everything which he found. My experience took a vacation after I had tune
my College professor's piano in a meantone tuning and before a class of
my musician friends, played the Mozart C Major Sonata, which simply sound
gorgeous, then I followed up with the Chopin Nocturne is F# major which
sounded horrible. I gave this demonstration to show the necessity of 
tempering our scales from Just intonation.

Many years later I met Paul Bailey who coyly suggested that I might find
some interesting things in some of the Well Temperaments. Then again later,
I heard Bill Bremmers tuning at an Annual Convention. Virgil Smith and I
were sitting together and we both remarked that that was the most beautiful
sounding Baldwin we had ever heard. The orientals were all over that piano
after the concert, taking pictures, crawling under the piano, playing the
temperament sequences, etc. Obviously they heard something quite nice too.
Bill stayed around for a while answering questions etc., but few of us were
understanding a word he said. It was not that he lacked the ability to speak
clearly, it was more than we were not able to take in at the time.

Since that time, I have developed a series of Well Temperaments 
(Contemporary, not Historical) starting with the Coleman 2, the Coleman 3,
on up through the coleman 12 so far. These are all rather mild Well 
Temperaments designed as slight variations which preserve some of the 
mildness of Well Temperaments, but not allowing any of the busy 4ths or 
5ths. It seems to me as a tuner that it is the busy 4ths or 5ths which cause
one to think that deviations from Equal temperament sound out-of-tune. The
variations in the thirds, if they are mild, are not noticed at all as being
out-of-tune.

I hope Richard (the Inquisitive) that you enjoy your trip as much as I have
enjoyed mine.

Jim Coleman, Sr.


On Sat, 13 Mar 1999, Richard Moody wrote:

> 
> 
> > 
> > >Even the mention of "Reverse Well" sparks heated emotion. 
> > 
> > Nope, no emotion here. Sorry.
> > 
> > David Severance RPT
> > Washington State University
> > Pullman, WA 99164
> 
> Good, lets get into Meantone.   That will get you cussin when the wolf
> comes out backward from the  beat table.  (well what do you expect from
> aural tuners without a clue from their predecessors?)
> 
> Ric Blue Meanie
>