Tom, you wrote Today, I heard, for the first time in a long time, a CD of Benjamin Britten's "Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings" (recorded 1944). Dennis Brain plays some amazing french horn solos wherin some notes sound incredibly out of tune. There is one note that could easily be 50 cents flat. But the effect is tremendous: the intonation of every note seems to have been chosen for a particular purpose rather than simply being "out of tune". I would describe it, from my ET perspective, as knowing the rules of equal temperament and knowing when to break them. You are correct in that the notes sound "out of tune." (I am a horn player..) That piece requests that the horn player do the opening passage on the "open" horn, that is without valves. Thus the horn is playing the notes on the natural harmonic overtones of the horn's fundamental. The higher the overtone, the more the variation from what we would consider the "normal" tuning. Particularly the 7ths, the 11ths, and their octaves. This is the way that Britten wanted it to sound. Ed Ed Carwithen Oregon
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