Non-ETs; more organic than ET?

[A440A@aol.com]

I wrote: 
<< > I must confess amusement at the willingness to offer a totally

> unsupportable value judgment.  In 1915, autos were in the second decade of 

> their

> evolution.  In 1750, temperaments were in their 20th century of development.

Tom Requests: 


>>Support that statement, please.   You're claiming that people were tuning 

temperaments in 750 BC?

Or do I misunderstand? >>

Yes, I think you misunderstood. (though I would have phrased it that people 
were "tempering tunings).
    To support:  Pythagoras, in approx. 470 B.C. , 21 centuries before 
Mozart,  defined a tuning of pure fifths.  Some scholars believe that he was simply 
analyzing a scale that had been in use in Babylonia or Mesopotamia for a long 
time.  The use of fifths to determine a scale produces what we now call the 
diatonic scale of T,T,S, T,T,T,S  etc.  This became the basis of Western musical 
construction, and until approx. the 9th century A.D.,  was used in various 
configurations as modes.  However,  way back in the 300 B.C.  Aristoxenus 
contested this manner of tuning and proposed several others.  The temperament wars 
were on! 

>From  http://www.72note.com/aristoxenus/aristoxenus.html
        "The school of Aristoxenes in the fourth century divided the tone 
into four "rigorously equal" quarter tones, but in reality this division was not 
considered as exact because Aristoxenes did admit in practice a certain 
"freedom of variation of the intervals," a certain "latitude" for each note. 
(d'Erlanger, Baron Rodolphe, La musique arabe. 3 vols. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1930) in 
[Daniélou, Alain, Music and The Power of Sound, Inner " . 

Perhaps a more recent voice will be more palatable? 
     "Ever since his own age a great controversy has raged about the 
teachings of Aristoxenus. Instead of using ratios, he divided the tetrachord into 30 
parts, of which, in his diatonic syntonon, each tone has 12 parts, each 
semitone 6. . . ." [J. Murray Barbour, Tuning and Temperament, a Historical Survey, 
Da Capo Press, New York, 1972, p22.] 

   Thus, Tuning debates have been around for a long time.  To fully 
appreciate and understand where we are, presently, it is essential that we know where 
we came from.  ET was considered and rejected long before the industrial age 
and manufacturer's desire for standardization caused it to become the default 
system we know today.  Musicians of the time seemed to have fought for the 
expressive abilities of a variety.    It is a fact that different degrees of 
consonance have different musical effects and create different responses in the 
listener.  This holds as true for a keyboards offerings from well-tempered keys as 
it does for the violinist's choice of how sharp to make a leading tone.  
    These changes in consonance cause changes in the emotional response of 
the listener.  Consider the serene calmness of a Pastoral composed and performed 
in C on a well-tempered keyboard as contrasted with a gut-wrenching, 
tension-filled dissonant funeral dirge played in Ab or Bmin on the same instrument. 
The amount of "out-of-tuneness" has a very strong effect on how these different 
compostions are perceived by listeners.  These differences in physical phase 
relationships affect the sensitive audience in emotional ways, not 
intellectual.  Those that listen with their intellect may miss this, but those that want 
to become emotionally engaged listen with a different antenna.  They receive a 
different *meaning* from the stimulus.  It is not only due to the tempering, 
the composer's creativity has the main influence, but the use of consonance or 
lack thereof appears to be an important aspect of the art.   
    Those that would approach the making of music as a science may derive a 
different meaning from how it sounds.  To quote M. McLuhan, "Meaning is the 
product of a message being received:  it is NOT a unique property of the 
message". 
   For some, (myself included), music is a spiritual activity and we pursue 
ways of making it more so.  It is a small step from the emotional to the 
spiritual world, and the spiritual world is a world which,  by definition, the 
scientist is barred from entering.  
Regards, 
Ed Foote RPT 
http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html