Sustain of 19th C. Pianos/Jorgensen was "Equal Temp (long)"

[Charles Neuman]

> From: "Joseph Garrett" <joegarrett@earthlink.net>
>
> I have both of Owens books. Although it's been a while since I've perused
> them, I don't recall reading a statement that one could not have possibly
> tuned ET on 19th century instruments, because the sustain was not long
> enough.

Yeah, I remembered that a little wrong. He said that the sustain of ANY
piano (including 20th-21st century pianos) is not long enough to
accurately judge the beats of fourths and fifths. Thus, tuners of the 19th
century who only used fourths and fifths could not have tuned an accurate
ET on a piano. Organs, on the other hand, had long sustains that allowed
tuners to listen to the beats for fifteen or more seconds, and they were
often tuned in accurate ET long before pianos were.

Here is the summary of Jorgensen's reasons why ET was not tuned in the
19th century:

1) In the 19th c, "tuning by ear" meant listening to the two notes of an
interval melodically, not vertically or harmonically. Thus beats could not
be heard.

2) People didn't use thirds or sixths. Although the beat frequencies were
known, it was assumed that the beats of thirds and sixths couldn't be
heard well on a piano.

3) The essential testing interval combinations were not discovered yet.

4) It was never mentioned in tuning manuals that beat speeds of a given
interval increase gradual as one moves up the keyboard.


So, this is circumstantial evidence to support the idea that strict and
perfect ET was not tuned before around 1900. Seems reasonable. But it
doesn't prove that nobody thought in ET before 1900 or that people didn't
consider what they were doing in the 19th century to be ET.

Charles