Hi Ed, With respect ET was known and used in the 1400's by lute players. Please don't blame this on research done 500 years later, or I will have to take a ride with Dr. Who! At 01:03 PM 12/12/2001 -0500, you wrote: >Tom writes: ><< it has been my impression that tuners >of past eras were ATTEMPTING to tune ET and didn't have the proper approach >to execute it. >> > > ET was being advocated by a few radicals in the late 1700's, but they >really appear as abberations to the field at large. Too many contemporary >writers were extolling the inequalities of temperament to think that they >wanted to get rid of them. Jorgensen offers more than a few examples. > I don't think ET was a goal of many people before 1900. However, as the >world became infatuated with science in the late 19th century, and popular >taste swung toward scientific anything, abetted by manufacturers efforts, I >can see how ET would have been heralded as the "best". And, I also believe >that tuners were quick to follow the money. > I guess I would say that the move from Meantone to Well-Tempered was >motivated by compositional imperatives while the move from WT to ET was >motivated by economic concerns. > As a side note, I have just had a customer ask me to retune his piano to >ET. This makes 5 people in 7 years to do that, and I am beginning to see a >pattern. Three of these people more or less play the same music. Know what >it is? > Gershwin, Rogers/Hart/Hammerstein/Carmichael/etc. > Show tunes from the turn of the century forward!! Since I believe that all >that music was composed with ET as the intonational environment, it doesn't >surprise me that it sounds best in ET. Other of my WT customers play this >music, but also stuff from Bach-Brahms, and they gladly accept the slight >damage a WT does to 20th century music. It is worth it to them to have some >key character for the rest of their repertoire. > There is no one tuning that will do it all. What is poison to one is >essential to anothers. I personally hear ET Beethoven as a harmonic >caricature. I would just as soon look at black and white photos of Van >Gogh's oil paintings. > >>>how can we be so sure that the HT we tune today is similar to what was >used in >Beethoven's day, since the methods we use to recreate those HTs are so >radically different from the methods used at the time? >> > >Owen J. can explain his investigative procedure in detail, and it doesn't >take a genius to follow Thomas Young's instructions to tune six pure fifths >and then six equally imperfect ones. There was also a tremendous amount of >math applied to the puzzle of temperament. > I think the piano's evolution is a larger deviation from "original >intentions" than any misinterpretation of the published temperaments. >Regards, >Ed Foote RPT > Regards, Don Rose, B.Mus., A.M.U.S., A.MUS., R.M.T., R.P.T. Tuner for the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts mailto:drpt@sk.sympatico.ca http://us.geocities.com/drpt1948/ 3004 Grant Rd. REGINA, SK S4S 5G7 306-352-3620 or 1-888-29t-uner
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