Greetings, I sent this earlier, and it appears not to have made it through to the list. 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. 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. 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. 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 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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