more on this temperament tangent

[Tvak@AOL.COM]

I have perfect pitch.  But you want to know something?  It's not so perfect 
that I hear a temperament in my inner ear when writing a piece away from the 
keyboard.  Is my mental pitch memory tempered?  NO.  It's in just intonation. 
 Every note is perfectly in tune with each other in my mind.  Now, I'm not 
Beethoven, and I don't pretend to compare myself with him, and I can't 
imagine the composing process that could yield such great music, but I've 
read that he would take walks in the woods, jotting down ideas on a note pad, 
no keyboard in sight, and I can't fathom that his inner ear was tempered 
either.  I can't believe that anyone, even Mozart, would (or COULD) think in 
a temperament.  

Any of the great masters could write effectively for any instrument they 
chose.  And so I would agree that keyboard works likely were influenced by 
the temperament of their day.  But to think that the great composers were so 
short-sighted as to not realize that the orchestra has no temperament, and 
therefore write their pieces with the constraints that a keyboard temperament 
would force upon them is to underestimate them.  Beethoven chose the key of D 
for the Ninth Symphony because that's the key he heard the piece in.  There 
are sections of the piece that have the tonal center of Gb.  What would that 
have sounded like on his keyboard?  (I don't know the answer to that, but 
I'll bet it sounded DIFFERENT with the orchestra playing it.)  
 
Mahler wrote notes for the oboe and flute that didn't exist on the 
instruments at that time.  (They do now, of course.) Thinking forward is a 
trademark of all the great composers.  Thinking backward is sometimes a 
trademark of some HT advocates.

Tom Sivak

P.S.
I want to say that I am not against HT in present day use.  I recently 
discovered EBVT and love it.  I want to find out more about HT's and explore 
that field.  It's just the tail-wagging-the-dog logic of this thread that I 
object to.  Temperaments do not drive the world of music.  Never did, never 
will.