Zeno Wood
Perhaps, but it's not as if the other instruments don't have intonation problems of their own. Brass instruments especially have lots of out of tune notes that the player should compensate for. And not all other musicians agree that ET on a piano is correct - here's a link to an interesting page about Pablo Casals and his view of intonation.
Jeff writes:
>Properly tuned ET, then, in theory at least, should not have varying degress of out-of-tuneness. The out-of-tuneness should be evenly distributed. Yes, each key will still have different characters because the rates of the faster beating intervals are still different.
I respectively take issue on with this on several points. The first is that we hear "out of tuneness" logarithmically. Faster beating at higher frequencies sounds the same as slower beating lower down; neither sounds more or less out of tune. Otherwise, where would it all end? If going higher in the scale were to create the sense of higher tempering (out of tuneness), by the time we went up an octave or so, the effect be twice as far out as the 14 cents wide it was to start with? To my ear, C4-E4 doesn't sound any any more or less out of tune than C3-E3. So what I'm saying is that in ET, all the thirds have the same amount of whatever "character" tempering imparts, regardless of where on the scale we listen. That character can be varied, to great positive effect, without coming across as out of tune, imho.
The second issue is that musically, where the tonic is located on the scale could be on any octave, and key characters were not referred to by octave, but by how far from C the tonic was located.
>>But it won't prevent you from playing in any key because something is so far out of tune. Today, when we teach singers from the art song books, you need to be able to play the same songs in the bass-baritone key, as well as the tenor, mezzo, and soprano.
The dark side of me had the instant reaction of "Singers be damned" ! but I will not say that. A large part of most singers' sense of pitch is relative. Of all the "perfect pitch" people I have asked to compare with the SAT, 4 or five cents is a normal range before they sense something is amiss. Far too often I have seen them happily singing with a piano that I knew was 4 cents flat. One customer who has a S&S type ca. 1879 keeps it at 435, (factory rebuild and the whole pin block is bulging upwards ) often has singers at house concerts. Whole groups love to sing with that piano, and nobody has more than a moment or two to acclimate. This included opera try-outs, one year! The UET's deviations are not, in my experience, perceived as a pitch change. And besides, we are talking about how to make the pianos sound their best, overall. Why would we compromise everything for that one small group of laser-ears? Clean octaves and unisons seem to placate 99% of them.
>You need to be able to accompany a saxophone, clarinet, flute, trumpet, etc., all in their own individual keys without throwing key "color" into the mix. <
When discussing the changes to the pianos' sound affected by perhaps 3 cents deviation from clinically correct ET, the accuracy of flutes and saxophones as well as trumpets trying to match them can't be too much of an imperative. Those instruments' notes, are routinely lipped up or down, depending on the key, and their expression via intonation is not limited by the 12th root of two. Installing the necessary changes to create a WT doesn't create pitch problems.
> The string quartet needs to be able to play in tune with the piano and it not sound like the piano hasn't been tuned (which was the reaction I've gotten).
That has not been my experience. I have had string players say how in tune the piano is, when there are thirds that follow the tradition order and range in size from 10 cents to 17 cents. Singers too. The excerpt from Zeno in the Casals interview is:
" Casals is adamant about intonation. He has had his pupils repeat passages until there isabsolute accuracy of intonation. To a pupil playing a sonata with piano, he recommends,"do not be afraid to be out of tune with the piano. It is the piano that is out of tune. Thepiano with its tempered scale is a compromise in intonation."
I don't think Casals was referring to anything but ET when he said that, so where may we go from here? I have found the WT approach to reduce the intonation problems, not create them
Regards,
Ed Foote RPT
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