[CAUT] ET vs UET was RE: using as ETD

[Laurence Libin]

It would be very useful to have a publication reprinting the documentary evidence Fred mentions. If there is one, could I have a citation? I don't doubt that pre-1880 Continental tuners (we can't know how many) often sought to make all keys sound alike on the piano, but whether their solutions measured up to ET is debatable; we have no way of knowing, and the imprecision of tuning instructions leaves the question open. As for musical productivity, what are the national statistics and sources, or how do you define productivity? Amount of sheet music published or instruments sold per capita? Number of composers we today regard as important? Considering that Britain was the major piano producer and that interest in intonation and enharmonic keyboards was strong there in the 19th century (Colin Brown, William Hawkes, Henry Liston, David Loeschman, T.W. Saunders, Thomas Thompson, not to mention a few in the USA), I'm not so sure which country's practice was exceptional or normative. I'm not even sure when Steinway definitively adopted ET; does anyone? And why should 19th-century tuners have been less apt to tune artistically than expert tuners today, for whom ET is a point of departure? By this I mean, for example, that octave stretching negates ET by definition, yet is often considered necessary for piano and music to sound well. 
Laurence         
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Fred Sturm 
  To: caut at ptg.org 
  Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 11:19 AM
  Subject: Re: [CAUT] ET vs UET was RE: using as ETD


  On Apr 19, 2010, at 7:38 AM, Laurence Libin wrote:


    Right; it's the "practical purposes" that leave leeway for adjusting (compromising) ET to suit the music or the instrument or the client. Few if any pre-1880 musicians would have thought in these terms however, because the statement implies that ET was then the established standard; I doubt it.


  I wonder on what basis you doubt that ET was the established standard pre-1880. I'll note that England, and to a lesser extent Italy, were exceptions (with survival of UET into the last decades of the 19th century), but in the Germanic countries and France, it is pretty clear from the surviving documentary evidence that ET was definitely the established standard, at least from the 1830s at the very latest (and arguably in Germany from before 1800). And those areas were the most musically productive at the time. (I guess I should also note that organs are a separate topic, due to the difficulty and expense of retuning, and different acoustical considerations).
  The evidence is pretty broad, from tuning instructions to descriptions in articles to private letters, etc. Reading these materials, it is clear to me that average tuners of that time were just as focused on ET as average tuners of 20th century USA, trying to make all keys sound alike. How precisely they worked, and what results they achieved, is an interesting question to investigate, but the notion of "artistic" tuning is absent from almost all the writings I have seen. I see very little evidence outside of 20th (and now 21st) century speculation to suggest that tuners adjusted or compromised ET on any kind of regular basis to suit music, instrument or client. There are a few such suggestions, but they are remarkable for their scarcity and for their lack of any useful detail. I don't know of any such sources outside the US and England - if there are German and French documents of this nature, please bring them to my attention.

  Regards,
  Fred Sturm
  fssturm at unm.edu
  "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Twain

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100419/c6c1f8cb/attachment-0001.htm>