In a message dated 98-02-03 19:06:41 EST, you write: << These ideas about universal harmony hark back to an old and discredited concept called "The music of the spheres", which held that the orbits of the planets corresponded to a musical harmonic series. >> Once, a guy tried to tell me that this was what the HT's were all about. I actually resisted the concept for many years myself, I used to tune the ET by pure 5ths. One day I was working in a local rebuilder's shop. I thought he was really bananas about HT's. He showed me a piano tuned in the Rameau-Rousseau-Hall 18th Century Modified Meantone Temperament (which, by the way will be my recommendation for Rameau on Michel LaChance's quiz when I get the time to fill it out). It was the most severe-sounding, bizarre temperament I had ever heard in my life at least from my perspective at the time. I remember thinking to myself that this temperament would never work on anything I would ever tune for. Then, as I was working and minding my own business, a pianist who often liked to visit that shop came in and played a long set of Brahms. My life was changed forever. It was never any thing that anyone said to try to convince me, it was what I heard in the music! It was something I never imagined could come out of a piano! (The same thing might happen to you if you get Ed Foote's CD and/or if you attend the HT Recital in Providence.) So today, when I describe what different kinds of intervals do in the HT's, I think mostly in terms of plain old beat speeds and the kind of "vibrato" they produce. The HT's, rather than having a smooth, even and chromatic distribution of the comma over the scale, divide it in alignment with the cycle of 5ths. It's not mysterious, it's not magic. It's really no different than the way a skilled musician is able to vary the intensity of the vibrato to suit the music as opposed to having the very same moderate vibrato in every tonality. In my analysis, that is the essence of what the HT's and key color are all about. Bill Bremmer RPT Madison, Wisconsin
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC