[CAUT] using as ETD

[Ed Foote]

I wrote: 


       As one pianist familiar with the WT's said, "One can decide whether the tempering is to be played harshly or expressively".  
Fred says: 

Hmm, then it is the way the pianist plays the interval that makes the tempering "harsh or expressive?" Sounds like a bit of a circular argument to me. 

       Not at all.  An accomplished pianist can play any passage to express different emotional states.  When there is a corresponding rise in the dissonance leading to consonance in the resolution,(happens a lot, all over the literature), the pianist can push the effect to a varying degree, with more resources working for them than would be available in ET. (involuntary emotional effects of dissonance are fairly well recognized,and have been discussed here at length, before). 



High tempering affects technicians differently than it does music lovers.
 I don't hear it as harsh, anymore.  



  >If you don't hear it as harsh, then the argument about WT making music sound more consonant seems to lose its force 

       Not at all.  The relative degree of consonance or lack thereof, can be measured, and is not dependent on my impression, though, I am not alone.  I have yet to hear an audience assign more consonance to the ET piano in direct A/B comparisons with Coleman's 11, regardless of the repertoire.  This includes rooms of techs as well as gatherings of musicians.   Having the ability to hear a 19 cent third as musically expressive rather than out of tune doesn't decrease the ability to sense and enjoy a 5 cent third's greater consonance.  
    Once again, if you reduce the tempering in the thirds of the 6 keys closest to C, you will reduce the dissonance in the vast majority of piano music. 

      The only way that a WT will cause as much overall dissonance as ET is if all 24 keys are used the same amount, and that does not happen in Western literature.  There is only a certain amount of dissonance to be had.   If it is spread equally, you will hear more dissonance in most piano music because in the entire amount of music composed between 1700 and 1900, there is a lot less remote key usage and a lot more diatonic.


 >   Well, Chopin is certainly one exception, as are Schubert and Schumann and many others. 

Chopin is a huge exception in his choice of keys. However, the case is to be made that the additional tempering is used to good effect in his compositions. Another case can be made that temperament doesn't matter much for Chopin.  We used a reversed form after listening to the same thing in ET and a WT.  They all sounded good, but the ET was not as engaging.  But pointing out the rare exception doesn't address the larger question.  
   Schubert, in the first 12 sonatas I looked up, uses C for 4 of them, Bb for 2, A for 3, D for 2 and Eb for 1. 
He doesn't get near the tempering of ET except for that one piece in Eb. A WT is certainly going to reduce the overall tempering heard in this music. Same holds true for Mozart and Beethoven. Maybe I misunderstood the original argument, but a WT decreases the amount of overall tempering heard in virtually all the major composers (Chopin excepted). 
Regards, 
Ed Foote RPT 

 
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100418/a0cc8268/attachment-0001.htm>