Greetings,
Dennis writes:
>> I have always held the position regarding Rameau that his comments from 1737 are not relevant to the volumes of music written long before. Interesting, but not relevant.<<
I doubt that the average tuner in the field at the time was overly influenced by theorists. Since English factory tuners in the late 19th century were still producing the WT form, if we are to think that Rameau's conversion to ET caused the continent to go with him, I wonder what kept the ET from crossing the channel for the 150 or so years after Rameau? Even today, we have the concert level techs going on and on about the .5 cent differences in stretch, etc.and publicly talking about it, while there are thousands of techs supporting themselves with no more than mediocre tunings, since that is all that is required of them, and keeping mum about it. (I have been there, myself). This is a large gap between theory and practice, and it is occuring in an age of instant communication and ease of travel. Would there have been faster adoption of a radical, difficult, temperament in a time when isolation was more the norm for the trades, especially trades that often sought to hide their skills from competitors ? Our Guild isn't like guilds of 200 years ago.
I imagine that musical anthropologists, centuries from now, will understand that by the 21st century, tuners all tuned to within 1 cent of perfect ET, since that is what all the literature is concerned with, and small, off the wall comments from tuners like me will be lost or disregarded. They may then overlook the fact that there was a huge increase in the use of non-ET between 1993 and say 2010.
Fred writes:
>>Rameau is very clear in laying out his arguments for ET, calling it the natural tuning for the rational system of harmony he was espousing. The fifth being more basic than the third, it should be as pure as possible. His practical instructions are crude: a circle of fifths upward from C, each "un petit peu" (a very little bit) narrow, with the proof being FC at the end also being a little narrow. <<
There is no proof. The FC could be a little narrow after a string of wildly varied fifths, some narrow, some not. Haven't we all tried to tune a temperament by using only fifths, and at the end, began going backwards if the last one wasn't right? And how close to ET did we get, with our 20th century ears and a lifetime of hearing only ET? It is still very difficult to get a passable one like that in any normal amount of time. The tuner 1750, steeped in WT tradition, was not likely more progressive than us, today.
Fred again:
>Some of the 20th/21st century experimentation with UETs has been aimed seemingly at a compromise that will cover all bases. My question (which I doubt can be answered definitively) concerns where the boundary lies between enhancement and detriment, between significant and insignificant. <<
I think the signicant improvement in leaving ET comes at the first, small step. It is not so much pushing the boundaries of what people will accept, but rather, getting away from the harmonic desert that a bunch of 14 cent thirds create. Shaping them in traditional order by just a little bit will rarely be noticed as non-ET, but the piano will often be sensed as more resonant by the uninformed player. I have customers that I had tuned ET for years for be struck by how much better their piano suddenly sounded when I went to the very mild Moore and Co. They cannot put their finger on it,(!), but the common impression is their piano is "warmer", even when they have gone over all the keys.
I don't think it is an intellectual difference at work here, but rather, a sensual response to the texture a WT creates by breaking the sameness of ET. This awareness can be ineffable, but these people are noticing something.
Inre the Di Veroli, Fred writes:
> But perhaps there are people with more acute hearing than I have (and with better tuning chops, capable of achieving these niceties with precision), who can tell the difference between that pattern and ET, without carefully listening to beat rates of thirds in isolation. <
I am not sure it depends on listening to isolated thirds so much as being open to how the intervals "feel". I see it as not unlike the difference we note in a piano when the stretch is changed. Can we hear octaves roll once per three seconds as distinct from octaves that beat once in 2 seconds? I don't think so, but there will be a difference in how the piano sounds and how the music feels.
The major differences in temperament are sensual, and individuals are so varied in how they perceive what they hear, that I can't see any way to decide on the optimum temperament other than listening to the music being played on a variety of the possibilites. If someone, after hearing an hour of Bach on a Kirnberger or similar tuning, prefers Bach in ET, I know that they possess very different sensibilties than I do.
It is taste, and there is no accounting for it.
Regards,
Ed
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