<HTML> Dear Susan, Bravo! Amen! You have pretty much nailed it on the head. You have said very eloquently what I have been trying to say all along regarding HT's. There is definitely a time and place for them but I have grown to appreciate ET simply because it opens up so many musical possibilities with much freedom. While ET is a compromise (as is any temperament) it is still a beautiful design, allowing much chordal and tonal freedom. While I can appreciate that other temperaments offer a more pure tonal harmony in certain keys/chords the fact is that the other keys or intervals suffer horribly, and for me, being able to play a wide variety of music from different eras makes ET the best choice. JMHO Regards, Greg Torres   Susan Kline wrote: (Major Snips) <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>Dear John, I have not been part of any "mainstream" historical temperament school of thought. My main exposure to both the ideas and the sounds has been a reading of Jorgensen, listening to his tapes, Ed Foote's CD, a few harpsichord performances, an introduction to the field during my training, including an introduction to mean tone tuning, and two of Jim Coleman, Sr.'s classes. We talk about temperament, and its effects on musical interpretation. For me, temperament comes under the broad heading of intonation. Temperament is an attempt to produce the best possible intonation while hampered by a fixed scale which must be used in many keys on an instrument which plays a lot of chords. Playing chords will bring out the worst of any intonation problem, especially since the lack of any vibrato in the piano will make the beats between intervals prominent. _Even in a single key_ different chords require small changes in individual notes to produce the best musical effects! How, then, can one have an ideal temperament even in a single key? .... One can't. In return for being able to play many notes at the same time, and many notes quickly, and throughout a tremendous compass, one gives up control of the envelope (tried a crescendo on a single piano note or chord lately?) and the intonation. As a consolation prize, assuming the piano has been recently tuned fairly well, the intonation can't drop below a certain less-than-ideal but often far-better-than-average level. I had the privilege of meeting William Primrose shortly before he died. I had just finished my tuning course. I asked him how his students dealt with the problems of playing the viola accompanied by the tempered scale of the piano. He sighed. "If only they played as well in tune as the piano!" he said. There's another fly in the ointment. Intonation and intervals are learned, not innate. Different cultures use very different scale patterns and interval sizes. Experiences aside, people vary tremendously, not just in the accuracy of their pitch discernment, but even in their modes of listening. Listening for melodic versus harmonic intonation is just the most important of these differences, most of which have not to my knowledge been explored. I just see the signs that people can listen to the same thing but hear it in vastly different ways. Here we also stray into musical tastes and emotional makeup. Firm and fixed values of "good sounding" vs. "bad sounding" just aren't realistic. One has to ask, "Good for what?" and "Good for whom?"</BLOCKQUOTE> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> >OTHER FACTORS >Of the number of pianos being played, only a tiny percentage would ever be >played in conjunction with another instrument.  Most musicians have only >the faintest idea if the piano is 'in tune'.  As long as unisons and >octaves are OK, they don't care all that much about the rest (OK calm down, >this is only meant to be half serious). Half serious or not, it is right on the money as far as my own experience is concerned. However, I would put the emphasis in slightly different places. I would say that the unisons and octaves are about 95% of _being_ IN TUNE, and therefore, that musicians DO hear whether the piano is in tune or not. This assumes that the temeperament isn't _overwhelmingly_ different from what they're used to. They simply have a much larger tolerance for minor changes in temperament than we assume they should. I think that if you try different temperaments with different people, you should make them extreme enough that they cause major differences in tonal color. If you try "very _mild_ Wells" and suchlike, I think that most people, especially most non-musicians, won't hear the difference and may be quite frustrated as they try to. The musicians might not be so frustrated, but they also might see no particular benefit. The ones who will really like historical temperaments will like certain stronger ones (and probably hate others.) The only way I see to find this out is to try a few. As Gina points out, the question of who is to pay for it arises. I think that in the early stages of your explorations it might be reasonable to view this as a learning effort, to be done at your own expense for your own interest and enlightenment, and your customers' enlightenment as well. If they like the results, they can pay you your usual fee ... if they don't like them, back goes the ET, and they can pay you for the usual tuning, but not the HT. (Assuming, of course, that they didn't ask for the HT themselves up front.) A friend (who is also a piano tuner) put her own experience like this: "They either say AHHHHhhhhhhhhh! or they say YUCKkkkkkk!" We were talking about the reactions of people when they heard a triad with just thirds. (I'm of the Yuck persuasion.) Perhaps Jim Coleman, Sr. could share his Coleman 11 with us pretty soon. He put it on a Kawai grand at the California State Convention, and I got to play it a bit. It is quite a strong Well, but most of the things we played on it in the Tuneoff sounded very musical to me. It beat the pure 5ths over 80% of the time for me. When Jim played the Chopin Prelude #15 (in Db major) in the Coleman 11, it sounded great to me. It was warm, sweet, and lilting. Then he moved it down to C major, and it sounded bland and gutless to me, quite lacking in grace, and generally annoying. He put it back up -- sounded wonderful. After that, I have a very different reaction than before to people who talk about the distant keys of Well temperaments being harsh or depressing, to be used for the expression of strong dark emotions. The proof is in the tasting, and we should all keep open minds as to what will be considered "good" or "bad." If the rest of the tuning is to my liking, equal temperament can sound very good to me. De gustibus non disputandum est. Susan Susan Kline P.O. Box 1651 Philomath, OR 97370 skline@proaxis.com "Time will end all my troubles, but I don't always approve of Time's methods."                 -- Ashleigh Brilliant</BLOCKQUOTE>  </HTML>