On Apr 11, 2009, at 9:57 AM, David Love wrote: > Some time ago now I heard a presentation by Michael Kimbell (local > technician RPT/composer and CTE) about this very subject concerning > when ET > actually came into common use. His findings, as I recall, concur > with this > and suggest the use of ET was in common practice much earlier than > current > mythology would suggest. I'll forward this to him and perhaps he > can also > comment. > > David Love > www.davidlovepianos.com Hi David, I have been in contact with Michael Kimbell, and he tells me he has collected considerable material from the 19th century, which confirms very positively that ET was very much predominant and unchallenged. I think most of his material is Germanic. He also found considerable plagiarism of Montal's work. I'll expand a bit on McGeary's article. Some of the instructions he examined were pretty bad, others quite reasonable. There were methods involving circle of 5ths, checking M3s and possibly chords as they became available; methods dividing the octave into three M3s, and then "working backwards" by fitting four 5ths into those M3s; and there were some that were quite badly written, but it was obvious that the intent was ET, as they said that all keys should sound exactly the same as each other, or words to that effect. Kirnberger was one of the very strongest proponents of the idea of "key color" in the late 18th century. It is interesting that his tuning method is one of the worst and least sophisticated in producing a gradation of sizes of M3s. Werckmeister III, about a century earlier, is far more sophisticated and better designed. One certainly does not see a smooth process of "evolution" from crude to refined. I have also been reading some articles by Barbieri on the persistence of unequal temperament in Italy in the 19th century. A very different picture from Germany, with a lot of people continuing to advocate for mean tone and modified mean tone of various sorts (Vallotti's scheme was a sophisticated and elegant modified mean tone, derived from 1/6 comma mean tone). Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu
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