Tom writes: << it has been my impression that tuners of past eras were ATTEMPTING to tune ET and didn't have the proper approach to execute it. >> ET was being advocated by a few radicals in the late 1700's, but they really appear as abberations to the field at large. Too many contemporary writers were extolling the inequalities of temperament to think that they wanted to get rid of them. Jorgensen offers more than a few examples. I don't think ET was a goal of many people before 1900. However, as the world became infatuated with science in the late 19th century, and popular taste swung toward scientific anything, abetted by manufacturers efforts, I can see how ET would have been heralded as the "best". And, I also believe that tuners were quick to follow the money. I guess I would say that the move from Meantone to Well-Tempered was motivated by compositional imperatives while the move from WT to ET was motivated by economic concerns. As a side note, I have just had a customer ask me to retune his piano to ET. This makes 5 people in 7 years to do that, and I am beginning to see a pattern. Three of these people more or less play the same music. Know what it is? Gershwin, Rogers/Hart/Hammerstein/Carmichael/etc. Show tunes from the turn of the century forward!! Since I believe that all that music was composed with ET as the intonational environment, it doesn't surprise me that it sounds best in ET. Other of my WT customers play this music, but also stuff from Bach-Brahms, and they gladly accept the slight damage a WT does to 20th century music. It is worth it to them to have some key character for the rest of their repertoire. There is no one tuning that will do it all. What is poison to one is essential to anothers. I personally hear ET Beethoven as a harmonic caricature. I would just as soon look at black and white photos of Van Gogh's oil paintings. >>how can we be so sure that the HT we tune today is similar to what was used in Beethoven's day, since the methods we use to recreate those HTs are so radically different from the methods used at the time? >> Owen J. can explain his investigative procedure in detail, and it doesn't take a genius to follow Thomas Young's instructions to tune six pure fifths and then six equally imperfect ones. There was also a tremendous amount of math applied to the puzzle of temperament. I think the piano's evolution is a larger deviation from "original intentions" than any misinterpretation of the published temperaments. Regards, Ed Foote RPT
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