Corte, I experimented with Young on my wife's piano for a while and ended up moving to Barnes Bach Well Temperament. Rebeca plays a variety of "classics" from pre-Bach to the modern composers such as Lecuena and Katchaturien. Debussy is a lot less "milky" but is still enjoyable. We enjoy the vocal quality of the beating in the chords. One's choice in temperament will be guided by one's requirements for musical genre. If you want to be able to change keys you must have a circulating temperament at least and if you don't want any change in key color, ET is a requirement. Some jazz players like a mild WT, some don't notice and some just got to have ET. As for holding a tuning, you notice the unisons first, always. When you change a piano from ET to a WT it will "remember" its last tuning and start slipping back in the direction it came from. I always treat changing from one temperament to another as a two pass pitch raise. After three tunings the piano is quite stable where you put it. As for other instruments being tuned to ET, that just is not so. Many rock musicians tune their guitars using "power chords" which are just fifths. Most other instruments utilize various forms of WT. The piano and organ drove the more recent temperament developments. They are restricted in that they are fixed intonation instruments and have a limited number of keys per octave. Most other instrumentalists will adjust their intonation, unconsciously, to a keyboard instrument when one is present. Choirs that sing a cappella will make a difference between C# and D flat etc. Werkmeister was developed for the organ and probably was not used much for harpsichords and clavichords. The impetus for ET came along with the industrial revolution and the popularity of science and was less artist driven than it was industry driven. Indeed some artists resisted it. Should we tune a WT today un-announced? I would go milder than Young in that case. I generally presume ET unless I'm asked and then we discuss the musician's repertoire. ET is equally dissonant, the WTs are unequal temperaments where the C major is usually the purest and the dissonance is to varying degree banished to the more "remote" keys on the circle of fifths. There was some philosophy mixed up into that. Some of the modern varieties abandon that rule and they have interesting relationships to explore too. It all comes down to taste eventually. My wife and I have become accustomed to the WT on our instrument and when we go piano shopping for fun we always notice how "bland" the tunings sound. I haven't seen a note from Paul Bailey on this yet but I'll pass on something he told me. He tuned a piano to a modified mean-tone for a period concert. Apparently they don't want him to "de-power" the instrument now. ;-) Goes to show that you can't fit people into hard and fast rules. Enjoy your explorations and I would advise open-ness when utilizing an alternate tuning. Those who will shy away from the suggestion will be those who would be the most incensed to discover it after the fact. My few cents worth, Andrew
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