Temperament, A pianist responds

[Don Rose]

Hi Ed,

With respect ET was known and used in the 1400's by lute players. Please
don't blame this on research done 500 years later, or I will have to take a
ride with Dr. Who!

At 01:03 PM 12/12/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>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
>

Regards,
Don Rose, B.Mus., A.M.U.S., A.MUS., R.M.T., R.P.T.

Tuner for the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts

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