Neil's comments

Neil Haverstick's jab at theorists deserves a reply.
Neil, music theory is done by theorists. Some of them may also play and
compose music, but they should be no more required to produce music you
like than you should be required to produce coherent theories. Would you
require a theoretical physicist to produce experimental results also?

John Starrett

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>>Meanwhile, fretted instruments have used ET almost exclusively
>>throughout their history,
>>because of the difficulty of frets needing to be in different
>>places from one string to the next.
>yet your logic falls apart here. Fretting in meantone is quite practical
>with frets placed right across the board. I use this fretting
>system myself for a negative meantone.

How do you tune your open strings?

That works if you're willing to change the choice of open-string
pitches, or go well beyond 12 steps per octave.

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On Sun, 13 Jul 1997, Charles Lucy wrote:
> In Digest 1132 Paul Hahn wrote:
> >Haven't you been listening?
>
> I have been both reading and thinking...

Sometimes I wonder.

> >Daniel has several times mentioned the fact
> >that many of the organs available to Mozart were in meantone.
>
> As I read
>
> > Organs hold their tuning splendidly.
>
> If all the pipes are "unmodified": yet there were other indicators
> suggested in the thread, about keys of composition, and other instruments
> must also have been used.

And what does that have to do with it? Your first post stated that
keyboard instruments were unreliable indicators of tuning practise
because the tuning was perishable. Organs are a direct counterexample
to that idea. They hold their tunings, not perfectly, but amazingly
well, and if they have been modified it is usually possible to find
evidence of it.

> >[Fretted instruments use ET] because of the difficulty of frets
> >needing to be in different places from one string to the next.
>
> yet your logic falls apart here. Fretting in meantone is quite practical
> with frets placed right across the board.

This only works if you are willing to use more than 12 pitch-classes, as
Gary has already pointed out, and which builders historically have not
done.

--pH http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote <*>
O
/\ "Foul? What the hell for?"
-\-\-- o "Because you are chalking your cue with the 3-ball."

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