Hi Israel
I think we can conceed that ETD's have made all tunings more accessible
to the ET tuning community at large... but then that really includes ET
as well. I doubt seriously however anyone has any idea of what the real
impact of ETD's has been on UET vs ET tunings... but I would suspect
given general observation of tendencies that Rons claim
"If not for ETDs, it wouldn't be an option today.
Is way off the mark. And how that point gets turned into:
"The point was and is that without ETDs, historical temperaments
would be much less often used, and not nearly as precisely defined
in as great a number as is today the case."
I am not sure... tho at least to some degree I'd say this second
formulation has some validity to it. At least to the ET based
associations like the PTG. That said again, I'd question at least to a
point how well informed the application of UET tunings based only on
ETD's is. Certainly we have a few folks who have delved in to music
history from this perspective... but probably a significant portion have
just whipped out one or another at best based on someones advice without
a real clue as to what they are doing.
As to your point about Maclom Binn... I wholly agree. We (in
organizations like the PTG) tend to forget that there is a very large
tuning world out there that exists beyond our ken. And they've been
happily ignoring us ET bastards in very large numbers for a long time
without any help from ETD's. One only need spend a bit of time looking
for their footpaths to find how heavily tread those are.
Cheers
RicB
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