Temperament selection

[A440A at aol.com]

Greetings, 
I wrote: 
>the question is how much tempering can a third take
>before it becomes a liability rather than an asset.  Few musicians or
>listeners register a faster third as "out of tune" until it exceeds some 
limit.  That
>limit is, in some degree, dependant on the listener's expectation. 

David writes: 
<< The only problem with that argument is that on one hand you are arguing 
that
a WT piano will seem to have greater sonority than an ET one which I would
attribute to the impact of the keys in which the 3rds are more pure.  Then
you are arguing that listeners will not register a faster third as "out of
tune" until it reaches a certain limit.  While I agree that there is a
window, you can't have it both ways. << 

       I am a little hazy on why My post was seen as an argument.  I posed an 
observation on one of the factors that affects people's response to non-ET 
tuning and  I do not make any mention of sonority.  I consider the primary 
temperament characteristics to be ones of consonance but I don't consider 
consonance and sonority to be the same thing. 
        Even consonance bears some discussion, since it may be judged by very 
widely disparate scales, (to pun).  A just third is certainly consonant, but 
in a 12 note octave, payment for that justness is made in bigger thirds 
elsewhere.  Some people consider only this perfection to be "consonant" and 
everything else is simply a matter of dissonance.  Others consider consonance to be a 
variable quality, only becoming dissonant at some personal level.  I consider 
consonance to be relative,  (but I digress.) 
       Listeners rarely register a faster than ET third as out of tune, they 
are not listening like piano techs.  The version of the Pathetique on 
"Beethoven in the Temperaments" is a prime example.  The Ab section, on a Prinz, has 
an unrelenting 21 cent third in the harmony.  Tuners have often told me how out 
of tune that sounds, and music lovers have often told me that it was the most 
expressive recording of that piece they had heard.  This is why I mentioned 
the reception being dependent on expectations.  As tuners, we rarely can be 
objective about what we hear, since many of us, by training, compare what we hear 
to what we expect.  
 

>> If you argue that WTs sound more
sonorous than ET and that people respond to that difference then it is the
slower beating thirds which are responsible for that, even if they are only
slightly more slowly beating. <<

     A WT has keys that are more consonant, yes, but that is not the 
attraction.  It is the musical texture that arises that gives the music a more 
engaging quality.  If composed skillfully, when a passage moves into more dissonant 
territory, then comes back, the listener feels a resolution without being 
consciously aware of why.  I think that people respond to this on a subliminal 
level,(techs are excluded, since we are usually listening to the tuning as opposed 
to the music), and the attraction comes from the texture, not the simple fact 
that there are more consonant intervals in some keys.  A friend that played a 
1/4 comma meantone told me that after about 10 minutes, he was bored.  He 
said that everything sounded the same, except the wolf keys, which he couldn't 
use.  
     I think the biggest shortcoming of ET and MT is their quality of 
"sameness" to the keys.  

>>By the same token it would then stand to
reason that if you played in keys on the backside of the circle of
fifths--those keys with 4 or more sharps and flats--that those keys would
sound less sonorous, which is what I hear. <<

     It depends on how those keys are used.  Consonance is not the be-all and 
end-all of music, and it is not the only benefit to be found in a WT. 
     Composers often write 10ths or 17ths in the remote keys that create 
beating at speeds found in vocal music's vibrato.  Used in this way, tempering 
becomes a coloring agent without providing dissonance.    
 
>>While the contrast may create a
more unpredictable and therefore interesting palette, I think it can be
misleading to use the sonority argument as there is both greater and lesser
sonority depending on the key.   >>

        The contrast is not exactly unpredictable. The rise and fall of the 
tempering in the passages as one goes through a sonata almost always seems to 
be intended, Composers, it appears, took advantage of the various levels of 
consonance to strengthen the emotional power of their music. In classical music, 
we never find a light-hearted, happy melody in F# or B nor do we  usually find 
sad dreary music in Am, etc.    
        The manner in which Beethoven used the keys demonstrates his ability 
to use the temperament to create coherently increasing tension leading up to 
resolutions. In this, the contrast is very predictable. It is also possibly the 
reason he was so adamant about people not transposing his keyboard works.  
They simply do not hold together if played in a key other than that which he 
composed them in. If transposed, on a WT, instead of three or four chords 
becoming increasingly tempered as he composes up to a climax, then resolving to a 
place of lower tension,(ie, tempering), in a transposed key, the same passage 
produces an odd hodgepodge of tempering and often has a passage resolving into a 
much more highly tempered key, which just sounds and feels awful. 
         On ET, none of these questions or considerations matters, but on a 
WT, pieces written during the WT era really only work the way the composer 
intended in the key that it was written.   As I write that, it occurs to me that 
that must be true for all music. Pitch *has* gone up a half step during the 
piano's lifetime, but the relative values of tempering have been extremely 
consistant from Werckmeister through the Ellis documented factory workers 200 years 
later.      

 >>Also, I find it somewhat contradictory to
say that people can both hear the difference and respond to it but don't
really register the difference at the same time.<<

      This is exactly what happens, in my experience.  The effects of 
temperament on the non-technician are usually subliminal.  The autonomous nervous 
system registers the differing levels of tempering, as evidenced by indicators of 
emotional states.  I think it would be more accurate to say that people feel 
the difference,  but even so, it seems to me that music written before 1900 
has much more effect when played on a tuning that supports that harmonic 
architecture.  Some of the later composers don't seem to be as sensitive to 
temperament, and some of the earlier ones demand it to be properly presented.  I am 
thinking about the meantone era, mainly.  Baroque keyboard music on ET is 
something I no longer care to listen to,  
    My personal opinion is that as far as consonance goes, there is none in 
ET and too much in meantone.  Only in a WT environment can I decide what level 
of contrast is appropriate, and actually place true consonance under the hands 
of a pianist. The effect can be dramatic, (or totally invisible, some people 
don't hear a difference)!
 
Ed Foote RPT 
http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
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