Ellis/Helmholtz/Hipkins

[A440A@AOL.COM]

  JD writes:

>Alexander Ellis  is most scientific and historical and impartial in his 
approach.  I 
> am really surprised that you seem not to have read Helmholtz and the 
> valuable supplementary material on temperament etc. that is supplied 
> by Ellis in the notes and appendices that is the result of the most 
> thorough and exact research.  <<

Greetings, 
   I think it would be a mistake to trust Ellis totally, especially in the 
face of A.J. Hipkins statements that in 1850, the Broadwood tuners were 
tuning 'anything but ET', and one of "old man Broadwood's" favorite tuners 
didn't use ET at all.  It is also true that Helmholtz has had much of his 
findings brought into question, and he has been proven wrong on more than one 
item.  Even Braid-White, with all the previous research at his disposal, 
totally missed the influence of WT's,  he made the leap from meantone to ET 
as one step.  I don't think he was totally informed.  Even Murry Barbour had 
never heard a WT in concert till Owen Jorgensen presented it, prior to that 
it had just been theory.  With so much ignorance in the trail,  we can't rely 
on any single viewpoint.    

>If I have, according to your imputation, a 
> resistance to historic temperaments, then I must have a very strong 
> resistance to equal temperament, since it has a longer documented 
> history than any other.

     It may have a longer documented history as a concept, but it has a 
rather short history of being available.  
Assuming usable directions were published in the early 1800's, unless the 
piano tuners of the time were more progressive, more in communication with 
one another, and more avante-garde than those of today,(doubtful),  it would 
have taken at least two generations for it to have be represented in the 
commercial world.  Just look at the resistance to change we see in the tuning 
community today.  Can we believe that tuners of 150 years ago were more 
willing to change the status quo?   Even then, if the major English 
manufacturer was not using ET in practise,( The earlier Broadwood 
proclamation was an advertising gimmick),   do we assume that the 
independants in the field would have surpasssed them in tuning science?  I 
don't think so.  The ET we are so used to may or may not have been around in 
1900, for which I will offer the following two anecdotes: 
     The first "old tuner" that gave me pointers(1972) made a point of saying 
the C-E had to sound good before I started tuning the black keys, and if it 
didnt' come out right at the end, just move the sharps around till it did.  
He was regarded as one of the better tuners in the area, too.  (He had 
learned in the late '40s)   
    When Bill Garlick took the tuning exam for the Guild,(this may have been 
in the '60's), he said that the man selected to test him listened to his 
temperament section and passed him on the spot, saying, "I didn't know that 
you could really get all the thirds to line up like that!" 
  
   I have tried to tune ET with the Montal instructions,(some time back).  It 
would be possible to get close enough to obviate distinctive differences, if 
you take a lot of time and work.  I think it less than probable that the 
majority of the tuners did this, when it is so much easier to toss a 
temperament together if you are aiming at a "well-tempered" result.   
    All the historical evidence is really only worth a little,  just enough 
to justify investigating the alternatives to ET.  After that has been done, 
then the real test is listening to music performed on temperaments of the 
same era and those of later and earlier ones.  This is the only valid way I 
know of to make an informed decision.  So far, the Victorian version of ET 
that I have left laying around the school is the piano of choice on the 
stage. I haven't publicized that it is different, but since a voice teacher 
requested it last month, I haven't changed it back to ET and the piano is the 
one that is used most,(even over the "concert" piano with the better action). 
 
    The  machines have given us the ability to produce a very clinical 
division of the octave, but that doesn't mean that this is necessarily the 
most musical arrangement. I don't think that the 19th century musicians would 
have been any more infatuated with the exact division than many today that 
have heard the alternatives.  It is all in the sound, not the history.  
Regards, 
Ed Foote RPT