Coleman 11

[Robert A. Anderson]

The current debate resulting from different ideas about temperaments
might be missing a point that I consider personally important in my
development as a tuner. My idea of a well-rounded tuner is one who can
tune. He/she will probably have pet preferences but will be able to tune
any kind of temperament. Let me offer an analogy from another field. My
wife's piano teacher at the University of Arizona, Ozan Marsh, used to
ask his students "Do you play THE piano or do you play A piano?" If you
only played A piano, that meant that you weren't versatile in handling
the variety of problems that different pianos pose. If you played THE
piano, that meant that you could play any piano.

Analogies certainly don't prove anything, but I feel that the more
versatility I have as a tuner the better. When I began to learn tuning
in the early '70s, I started with Braid White's book. That was ET and
that was all I knew until Owen Jorgensen published TUNING THE HISTORICAL
TEMPERAMENTS BY EAR in 1977. I later discovered that Merrill Cox, in
Provo, used non-ET in teaching tuning. I wish I had been able to learn
from someone like him. And I am subsequently discovering that others
have been introduced to non-ET as novices.

I'm afraid Braid White's book didn't teach me much about tuning the
temperament. It seemed impossible. I met Virgil Smith in 1978, and in
one tutoring session, I learned a method for finding the correct beat
speeds for temperament intervals. White convinced me to forget non-ET.
He acknowledges "The Mean-Tone Tuning" and dismisses it thusly: "It is
easy to see how, with the rapid expansion of musical art during the 17th
and 18th centuries, the demand for something more widely useful than a
Mean-Tone Temperament soon became irresistible. Sebastian Bach began to
tune his clavichords in Equal Temperament so that his pupils might be
able to play in all tonalities without frequent retunings. The
celebrated Well Tempered Clavier, 48 Preludes and Fugues in each of the
twelve major and minor tonalities, was the first fruit of this famous
experiment in Intonation"(PIANO TUNING AND ALLIED ARTS, p.243).

I took White's book to be my piano technician's Bible. I think quite a
few others did, too. I guess I feel that I was misled. I'm not blaming
White, but I am grateful that it's getting easier to be exposed to a
broader knowledge of tuning. 

Bob Anderson
Tucson, AZ