[CAUT] ET vs UET

[David Ilvedson]

This has been said many times by Bill Bremmer and others on the List years ago.   My ET tuning is just as accurate in practice as any Historical tuning is in practice...so what?   It seems to be brought up as a defense for  Historical tunings...I just don't understand that reasoning...?   
 
David Ilvedson, RPT
Pacifica, CA  94044

----- Original message ----------------------------------------
From: "Laurence Libin" <lelibin at optonline.net>
To: ed440 at mindspring.com; caut at ptg.org
Received: 4/20/2010 4:03:23 PM
Subject: Re: [CAUT] ET vs UET


>Yes; I was kind of hinting at this conclusion but didn't want to say it in this forum. 
>Maybe one reason fortepiano is better for you (what nerve!) is its milder 
>inharmonicity. That's partly why I prefer gut-strung violins. 
>Laurence
>  ----- Original Message ----- 
>  From: Ed Sutton 
>  To: caut at ptg.org 
>  Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 6:43 PM
>  Subject: Re: [CAUT] ET vs UET


>  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