Temperament use, (was Feldman's piano)

[A440A at aol.com]

Don writes:

<< Hi Ed,
Have any of your challenges of ET vs HT been done with double blind testing? 
>>

    I wish!  It would be interesting to have a "clinical" trial, but so far, 
that opportunity hasn't arrived. It would be nice to play the gamut of music, 
from Bach to Gershwin, on the two pianos, too.   The Coleman 11 gives 
tremendous benifit with so little change.  I think Jim's tuning is closer to a 
universal tuning than ET will ever be, and the musical communinity is slowly starting 
to relax about bending the status quo.  They sure seem to like the Victorian 
influence to the temperament around here. 
       In Rochester, the two RX-3 pianos were in ET and Coleman when a room 
of tuners heard the same pieces played on both.  Those two pianos were as close 
to one another, tonally, as any I ever saw, but the sound was profoundly 
different, according to the audience and pianist.   
    Though not as exact as that, there are many cases here of pianists being 
unaware that anything was atypical with a tuning , yet commenting on how well 
they thought the piano was tuned.   I have customers that tell me that they 
played a piano around town "tuned that way that you do",  often mentioning that 
the piano sounded like a grandparent's piano etc. did in their youth. I leave 
them with a very mild step out of ET and subsequently, I take them to stronger 
departures.  I don't lose many of these customers.  
      Makes me think tuners of 80 years ago may have still been shaping ET, 
that there was still a a little bias from the earlier harmonic influence in the 
keys.  It may have been all art ,for what I know.  I do think today's pursuit 
of exactitude may carry a hidden musical cost and there is a more musical way 
to tune.
        Of greater benifit, we can choose to see "strengths and weakness", or 
we can see a "variety of resources".  When those resouces are a slight 
variety in the thirds, there is a new texture to the sound that I am finding 
pianists really like, a lot. 
       What evidence I have is empirical, and totally suspect.  It has only 
been tested in the most organic and loose manner.  For this reason,  I 
encourage all tuners to explore for themselves. It is simple, ie,  just go through the 
basic "Tuning for Taste" that Jorgensen presents, or dump the numbers in a 
machine and compare.  Don't try to change the intonational world of your piano 
faculty all at once.  But you can easily try some of the mildest on the next 
spinet, it is like fertilizer on a rose bush.  It makes them blossom with 
harmony you didn't know they had. 
Regards, 
Ed Foote RPT 
http://www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/index.html
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
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