<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ccccff" text="#000000"> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> Among the reasons why violonists could be more picky about their piano tuning than other players : ---  They've been confronted to false intonation for  at least the 3 or 4 first years of their training. To be the parent of an aspiring violonist is a hell on earth at that time. For the pupil and for their teachers a "comma" mistake is a big mistake. Funny enough, most of them rely on a theory where a major second is supposedly divided inequally in nine "commas", 5 commas being sharp and 4 being flat.  This refers to a theory from the XIXth century used by physicists, and IMHO with no great musical sense, except the fact that sharps tend to be somewhat greater than flats. But any time a violonist plays a note, (s)he concentrates on its pitch because (s)he has to build it up, and has been chewed out for years about playing out of tune. Pianists usually have no problems playing E flat  and  Dsharp and even  F double flat on the same black key.  Violonist  do...  So any piano is indeed out of tune for them.  Pianos just lack another set of ebony keys... ---  What's more, a violin is tuned in pure fifths. I think that is the main reason why the violin family has "only" four strings on its various instruments. The violin, for example, is tuned GDAE going upward. If one added another string -a fifth again-, it would be B, and then one would have to chose its "temperament" in order for it to be in tune with the Gs played on other strings...  Other reasons might have their importance as well, like the bridge height and harmony table, but still this temperament problem has to be solved.  (Another bowed instrument, the viol, has 6 strings and is tuned in fourths and thirds, but those are fretted instruments and as such must use some sort of ET to be in tune with themselves all across the fingerboard.) ---  When a violonist plays with a piano, (s)he has to constantly adapt the pitches to the piano's. Most of the sonata litterature involves great amounts of vibrato and that helps, but the only way a volonist could a capella mimick an ET piano third or fifth senza vibrato would be to count beats between the notes (s)he produces... An impossible task, obviously, when performing a piece ! So they tend to develop a very sharp and fast discriminating ear, although with a learned trend to privilegiate the pure fifths that are their starting point and main reference, when tuning, playing alone or in string quartet. Interesting enough, slide trombone players tend to like and favor pure thirds when performing in trombone ensembles. Beethoven's trombone trio, one of his first compositions, performed at his funeral, gives a very nice exemple of this. It requires something like "just intonation", pure thirds and pure fifths, so that the players have to adapt and correct their pitch constantly, depending on the harmonic function of the interval they play. When performed by great trombone players, it sounds magnificent.  Anybody ever got complaints about the beating major 3rds on a trombone player's piano ?  :-) Of course this is my experience as a music-loving amateur, and deductions I make from my not-very-exhaustive knowledge of those instruments and the temperament theory. Any thoughts ?   Jean Debefve, Belgium  </body> </html>