Selling WT (was Temp. comparisons:)

[A440A@AOL.COM]

Jason writes:
 
>  A week before the tuning, I lent him the "Six Degrees" CD and asked
>him to listen to it and then tell me what he thought. (Of course, I expected
>him to like what he heard.) But his reaction was quite different. It made
>him shudder. He found it weird, strange, uncomfortable, and he earnestly
>asked me to just tune the piano with a normal ET.
 
>My take-away from this experience is that the Six Degrees CD is too extreme
>to use as a "lure" to WT. Maybe the choice of the Mozart Fantasie is too
>brooding, and its repetition three times in three different temperaments
>is too much. Not sure. But I won't use *that* again.

Greetings, 
   Be wary of making decisions on any one pianist's response.  A musician 
that can't get enough dissonance will be just as likely to skew your decision 
making as one that hates anything that they are not used to.  
   As to his aversion to the sound of "6 Degrees",  I am curious as to what 
it was that he had problems with.  Was it the Scarlatti?  That selection in 
MT has much less dissonance that anything in ET or WT on the record.  Was it 
the Grieg?  The tuning for that is extremely close to ET, but the selection 
uses many of the more consonant sounds available in it.  The Chopin has less 
tempering  in that odd DeMorgan than it would have had in ET or WT, so it 
still isn't clear what it was disturbing him.    
   All in all, the record has less total dissonance than if the selections 
had all been done in ET, so the greatest change is the addition of contrast, 
which seems to increase the emotional involvement of many listeners,(and this 
may be what your pianist can't handle).  If the added consonance creates a 
problem, then I would have thought that the Op 110 would have been a great 
improvement for him.   
    And in spite of everything we do, there are still musicians out there who 
like what they know, and the unfamiliar will be uncomfortable.  There is 
nothing "wrong" with this, but anybody that is challenging the status quo 
should be aware that individual's tastes are not going to agree with them, 
all the time.  it is not  necessarily a reflection on what they are hearing, 
but possibly what they are expecting.  This is why it is often best to let 
the sound of the instrument's tuning do most of the explaining. Words can 
often get in the way.  (ie, Jon Page's recent experience with professional 
musicians....)
Regards, 
Ed Foote RPT