On 11/19/05 8:12 PM, "A440A@aol.com" <A440A@aol.com> wrote:
> Fred writes:
>
> << there are two Broadwood's Best.<snip> The assumption is that the tuner
> claimed to be tuning equal
> temperament, but clearly these are "well-temperaments," and rather piquant
> ones at that. Moore is somewhat tamer, but also quite distinct in key color.
> My favorite "Victorian" tuning). >>
>
> I was only aware of one Broadwood's Best, and I have used the
> Broadwood's "Usual", which Jorgensen includes in his Big Red Book.
RCT has one "Broadwood's Best" under Well Temperaments, listed as Ellis
tuner #4, and a second Broadwood's best under quasi-equal, listed as Ellis
Tuner #5. Both are derived from that chart in the big red tome, which
includes the "usual" tuners as well. #4 is the piquant one, approaching
Valotti/Young in key color differentiation, a bit more flavor than Moore. #5
is quite mild.
> He makes the case
> that Broadwood's advertising their exclusive use of ET was actually NOT what
> we call ET. It is logical that against the common use of meantone, any of the
> well-temperaments could have been regarded as equal. I really think that 200
> years ago, non-restrictive temperaments would have been called "equal" simply
> because all keys could be used. I can't imagine any plausible reason why a
> marginally trained tuner would seek to tune the most difficult temperament
> when
> the WT's were so simple and had been in use for some time.
Yes, absolutely. The historical argument is and has been flawed all
along for this very reason. There has been "general agreement" on the
adoption of equal temperament since, say, about 1850. But the general
acceptance of the supposed "sound" of equal temperament was based on what
real, live tuners were producing. And it sure wasn't what we are tuning
today.
The result was a very strange feed-back loop, where the musical
community said it wanted ET, based on the non-ET it was hearing. And so the
tuning community tried more and more to achieve theoretical ET, resulting in
the stress placed on the perfection of the temperament (meaning
extraordinary evenness of progression of M3s and derivatives) within our
profession over the past 25 years or so. This is done from the point of view
that we are attaining a higher level of excellence for our customers. (And
the push towards perfection of the temperament has often been at the expense
of learning the skills that really matter in the real world: unisons,
stability, and appropriate stretch. But that's another issue).
I have long wondered whether there is any musician who, without slow and
careful examination of a tuning, could tell the difference between "perfect"
ET and a mild "Victorian" (quasi-equal), unisons and stretch being equal, in
a blind test. Certainly a mild Victorian would fail the PTG test, which is
Owen Jorgenson's definition of ET. I wonder if a proper interpretation of
the term ET shouldn't really include a considerably broader range of
inequality, from a practical standpoint. I think a great deal of the
controversy surrounding the subject in certain quarters is based more on
theory than on actual auditory experience.
There is no question that tunings from the Baroque through the Romantic
period were never what we would call ET, yet many of them were considered by
the musical public, composers, and performers to be ET.
> That the Broadwood tuners all varied their tunings away from strict
> equal is not a sign of their error or sloppiness. ALL the tuners varied in
> the
> same direction, which was a mild form of the well-temperaments common
> qualities. However, I no longer need the historical impetus to use the
> "other"
> tunings. Current customers, (with their money) are a more important reason
> for me to
> move ET out of first place in what I use.
>
>
> I have used the Moore and Co. often, and recently tuned it on a D for the
> head of the department's recital of Mozart and Schubert. I didn't tell him
> about this, but instead, had tuned his studio pianos in a Moore and Co.
> temperament about a month before.
I tuned every piano at the University of New Mexico, including the
concert pianos, to Moore for an entire academic year. I heard no comment,
pro, con, of any sort. I use it for my personal piano. I like it, but I'm
not positive that I necessarily prefer it to ET, or notice it very often. It
is really very subtle in actual performance. Sticks out quite obviously if
you listen to intervals in isolation, or do a series of cadential formulas
or the like. But in the context of actual musical performance, it fades well
into the background, far below voicing and interpretation I think. As it
happens, I play very little music written before 1900, so that no doubt has
considerable bearing on my own experience in listening to the variant
temperament (I do find it interesting that, contrary to assertions by many,
moderately unequal works just fine for quite piquant contemporary works,
even 12 tone).
> The performance sounded real good, with a noticeable increase in
> clarity over the ET I had been using. When a colleague (the tuner for the
> Steinway
> dealer here and a staunch user of ET) remarked how great the tuning sounded,
> but that one section in the Mozart Bb sonata called attention to itself as
> highly tempered, we determined it was a modulation down to Eb, which is
> tempered
> exactly like ET! She was sorta surprised that an ET third was that active,
> but compared to the consonance in the rest of the piece, it was obvious how
> highly tempered a 13.7 cent third really is. We forget that when everything
> is
> like that.
> As Jon Page mentioned, the Broadwood tuning has a very tempered A-D, but
> musically, it doesn't jar or stand out. I have had no customer raise an
> eyebrow at that, rather, someone will occasionally be given pause at the
> amount of
> tempering in the E-G# or F#-A#.
> I still believe that the inequality provides a critically important
> dimension to the keyboard music composed before true ET was in use. I have
> begun
> using either the Moore, Coleman 11, or Broadwood temperaments as the default
> tuning, and have found that 99% of the pianists remark on how much more
> resonant
> their pianos sound. The Broadwood's Best has a noticeable change in harmonic
> values in it when used for 20th century music, and I prefer ET for a lot of
> that.
> Where these mild WT's really shine is on the smaller pianos. Very few
> spinets or consoles are played in keys with more than 4 sharps or flats, so my
> logic is that a tuning that increases the consonance in the keys which are
> played virtually all the time will make the piano sound far nicer. Tuners I
> know that have tried this agree. ET is great for us techs, it is easy to
> measure, and easy to carry the octaves out from, but the musical community is
> telling
> me that their pianos sound better in something else.
> I will be carrying the Temperament Revival program to the Convention next
> year in Rochester, so maybe we can investigate farther
I'll look forward to it.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
> Regards,
> Ed Foote RPT
> http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html
> www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
>
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