Ed S. Writes:
>>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?"<<
I submit that the difference between clinically perfect, and simply the imitation of it ( like what a SAT will do with the FAC of a D ), is not musically detectable by humans, and can be disregarded. Demanding a temperament be accurate to .1 cent before being acknowledged as ET is, to my view, simply a way to avoid the real life discussion. On a good scale, the machine driven imitation is so equal we can, for any practical purpose of comparison, just accept it as a fixed quantity.
" It's not a bug, it's a feature!" The aversion to remote keys with heavy tempering seems to be mainly resting on theory. Is it not indicative of something that so many piano sonatas are written in keys that send the development section into the highly tempered regions? And that often, this movement is marked by slow, sustained, complex harmony, which maximally exposes the harmonic qualities of whatever intervals are there? There is a way to make harmony out of dissonance, and the 18th cen. composers show their genius when they do. Seems like a good way to make the recapitulation and return home to original tonic be welcomed! If keyboards were equal, why would there have been such common treatment of these keys?
The 19th century composers certainly seemed to be able to use more highly tempered remote keys to sublime musical effect. In one room full of piano techs, a Brahms (I think,but it may have been Schubert) piece in Ab on a Coleman 11 was judged to sound better than the ET version played right after it. Sure, there was increased dissonance, it was a musical quality of the passage, and rather than detract, created a musical effect that was pleasing to 95% of the crowd. As tuners, why would we ignore this or think it to be avoided?
There is also an unmentioned lag time between when ET became prevalent and the composers that grew up around it began composing. I believe the first 6 years of life instill a harmonic template in our brains. It does for language, among other things. So, it may be that trying to apply an 1830 ET date to compositions written by composers born before then is stretching the influence backwards. Even in modern times, with fast communication, it still takes decades for major change to become widespread.
Regards,
Ed Foote
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