At 9:58 PM -0700 4/24/02, Susan Kline wrote:
>I discovered that during
>the cello-studying years I had developed
>a very strong taste for what size intervals should be.
At 9:27 PM -0400 4/24/02, A440A@aol.com wrote:
> It was enough, she told me
>she would like to retune the piano at her house,(and yes, she said she would
>be glad to pay for it again).
> So, this morning I went back and retuned. She sat down and played for
>approx. 30 seconds, stopped, and with tears in her eyes, said, "this sounds
>like my mom's piano did". She moved to the key of C and said that it was the
>first time in years that she had liked the sound of C. She then went to Eb,
>thought it sounded great, tried out the Ab, said "wow, that is pretty intense
>but I kinda like it, in fact, I love the way this thing sounds.
It's pretty clear that both Susan and Ed's singer each had a strong imprint
of one kind of temperament or the another (the other...). Susan tells
use which she learned her's, in the conservatory playing in chamber
ensembles. The singer learned hers in her mother's house.
We can assume that the technician maintaining the pianos where Susan
went to school was instructed to tune them to ET. The singer's mom's
piano seemed to the singer to be a perfect match to a Broadwood's
"Best". It would be interesting to know whether the tuning she was
attached to was something placed there recently by her mom's tuner.
Can we guess whether this tuner was a Johnny Appleseed spreading down
HTs, or was he only offering ET, like most everyone else in the
business at that time?
The singer might have experience some rich and contrasting flavors in
that intonation, but there remains the possibility what she grew up
listening to was a single tuning, five and a half years later. The
bends and stretches in the tuning (and the climatic forces behind
them) would work their same magic regardless of whether what the
piano started out with was HT or ET.
Actually, an interesting analogy for this occurred in the recent
mall-movie, "Kate & Leopold". The person responsible for the quaint
time travel which brought Leopold forward was locked up in a insane
asylum, and had to plead his case passionately to a teary-eyed young
patient aid. The story he told about a dog (color-blind) suddenly
seeing the full spectrum of the rainbow, and being impossibly
insistence on telling his fellow dogs (also color blind) of this
other world.
I say this, because I've been on this list for a few years, all the
way back through when somebody, maybe Newton asked whether anybody on
the CAUT list wanted to talk about it, and Dennis Johnson wrote
"..me, me, yes, over here, (waving his arm in the air like a 2d
grader)". I've watched a number of very respectable and admirable
techs learn to swear by it. And I must say, it's like watching the
American continent be discovered, with so much rich territory to
enjoy.
I myself am an aural tuner, a student of Bill Garlick's, and I would
have no major problem exploring all of this. Heck it's like a tailor
discovering that there are endless hundreds of fabrics that can be
turned into clothing, not just unending Khaki. But I also gather that
a great number of HT's current advocates came into this realm using
ETDs. Certainly the sophistication of the current age of ETDs can
fairly and squarely accomplish any given HT equally as well on a
Lester spinet as a concert hall D. For me they resemble, exploring
this new continent using GPS telemetry, as opposed a compass and the
stars, which is the near equivalent to the 19th century style of
aural tuning I practice. The mathematical consistency of the ETDs
themselves would seem to homogenize each individual HT as laid out by
these ETDs.
It's a brave new world.
(P.S. I'm sorring to be picking up this thread. I should have fired
it of before the NEECRegional Conference, by the VT Chapter. Among
other very interesting things was Dan Franklin's class. Apparently
one class was quite dramatic.)
Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.
"No, Please wait, you're all individuals" Brain Cohen, exasperated
"Yes, we're all individuals" the throng assembled in the street
below his window, in unison
"I'm not..." Lone dissenter.
...........Monty Python's "Life of Brian"
+++++++++++++++++++++
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC