[CAUT] ET vs UET

[Ed Sutton]

Laurence-

Here's the problem: ET can't be tuned on the piano. Dan Levitan wrote some wonderful articles in the 1990's in which he concluded that the best we do is adjust selected partials to approximate what they would do in "real" ET, producing, in effect, our best attempt at "imitation ET."  So we are asking "How good is the imitation?" Not "Is it correct?"

Consider, for a start, that a stack of 100 cent semitones would not add up to a stretched, inharmonic, piano octave. A fourth or fifth with a wound lower note will have a very different width than it's chromatic upper neighbor with both notes plainwire, and the compromises to get them to sound similar (if possible) will be different, then getting the thirds to progress will require a different compromise for those strings, meaning now a higher level of interconnected compromises...

It's always an approximation on the piano! A different approximation for every piano scale design! But done right, it sounds like ET.

By the way, I much prefer the sound of a string quartet to that of a string trio with piano. Fortepiano is better for me.

Ed Sutton
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Laurence Libin 
  To: caut at ptg.org 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 6:23 PM
  Subject: Re: [CAUT] ET vs UET


  Fred's qualifiers "reasonable" and "fairly refined" get to the crux. To my thinking ET is a very precise condition, not a spectrum, and any approximation therefore isn't ET. Like, you can't be a little bit pregnant; either you are or you aren't (well, not you, Fred). Referring way back in this discussion, I reiterate my opinion that ET is an ideal (like any other precise system) often compromised unintentionally or deliberately in practice, and I believe this has always been true. Whether or how much the deviations matter in music performance is something else again.

  Inching forward a bit, I'd suggest that we tolerate hearing violin or voice and piano together, or piano and orchestra, even though they're not usually strictly in tune with one another, because either we pretty quickly disregard the dissonance or we don't perceive it--or, in some styles of music we even enjoy it. Nevertheless, there's something to be said for hearing Classical chamber music, at least, performed with pianos that sound less harsh in ensemble than most modern pianos do (to my ears), both because they're built that way and tuned that way.

  Laurence    


  There were probably at least a few tuners capable of either a reasonable ET or a reasonable WT in London during this time. And the traveling virtuosi would probably have used them - speculation, but reasonable speculation. It seems unlikely they would have accepted playing on MT or extreme Ordinaire. 
      No doubt there were traditions that persisted, but we must note where those traditions were rooted. In Germany, they were thoroughly rooted in a century of circular temperaments, and knowledge about how to achieve a fairly refined ET was readily available. 


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