John Ross wrote: "Hi Ed, I have a question. Is there a table or some reference, that says which HT, sounds best with which composer? How does a person determine which piece of music, sound best in a particular HT? Thank you. John M. Ross" I think that's a good question, but I think that there's a better way of going about it than looking for someone else's notion of what temperament should be used in which situation. Everyone who's interested should simply start trying them out, listening, and letting others listen. It's a little scary because we have been living with ET and have not known anything else. We don't know how people will react to something different, so we tend to play it very conservatively. I've read comments on this list like "Customers expect us to tune ET, therefore it is unethical to tune anything else." Well, in my experience it is a rare customer who has any idea what ET is. Yes, there are exceptions to any generalization. There are also a few customers who find fault with notes in my ET tunings, but in 99+ per cent of those cases, the customer will complain about the pitch of a single note, without reference to any other note. It wouldn't matter what tuning I used because the customer would never play an interval while evaluating the tuning. We have curious notions about what "in tune" means. We want beatless unisons and beatless octaves and multiple octaves. But we want rapidly beating 3rds and 6ths. Why is this so? Why do we want to arrange our 3rds, for instance, so that they gradually speed up as the pitch rises? The only reason I can tell is so that all keys sound the same. But why should all keys sound the same? So that there is no obstacle to modulation? Why can't you modulate if the keys have different textures? The only answer I can give is: "That's what we were taught." Does a 7BPS F3-A3 sound better than a just F3-A3? I don't think so. I think it's arbitrary. Let me apologize now for heading off to left field with this topic. I probably won't get suddenly set off again for a couple of years, so don't worry. I am reminded of something I read years ago. Max Planck, the physicist, wrote, in his "Scientific Autobiograpy", that at one point he learned that scientists were not swayed by the truth of new theories, but that those new theories became accepted because a new generation of scientists emerged who grew up with those theories and therefore embraced them. I think he could have been talking about piano technicians as well. My point (if I have one) is that we should not close our minds to listening. John, I think you will get farther ahead by trying out some not-ET temperaments to find out what they sound like in musical contexts, than you will by getting someone to tell you which one you should use. There's no consensus that will help you hear what you need to hear to make that decision for yourself and whoever will be using the instrument you tune. Well, that may not help you at all, but I certainly feel better. Take it, Ed. Bob Anderson Tucson, AZ
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