Yes; I was kind of hinting at this conclusion but didn't want to say it in this forum. Maybe one reason fortepiano is better for you (what nerve!) is its milder inharmonicity. That's partly why I prefer gut-strung violins. Laurence ----- Original Message ----- From: Ed Sutton To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 6:43 PM Subject: Re: [CAUT] ET vs UET Laurence- Here's the problem: ET can't be tuned on the piano. Dan Levitan wrote some wonderful articles in the 1990's in which he concluded that the best we do is adjust selected partials to approximate what they would do in "real" ET, producing, in effect, our best attempt at "imitation ET." So we are asking "How good is the imitation?" Not "Is it correct?" Consider, for a start, that a stack of 100 cent semitones would not add up to a stretched, inharmonic, piano octave. A fourth or fifth with a wound lower note will have a very different width than it's chromatic upper neighbor with both notes plainwire, and the compromises to get them to sound similar (if possible) will be different, then getting the thirds to progress will require a different compromise for those strings, meaning now a higher level of interconnected compromises... It's always an approximation on the piano! A different approximation for every piano scale design! But done right, it sounds like ET. By the way, I much prefer the sound of a string quartet to that of a string trio with piano. Fortepiano is better for me. Ed Sutton -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100420/897a4dbe/attachment.htm>
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