ET Advocates

I'm back from my trip to Ethiopia and despite the border war with
Eritrea, I had a great time. However, I'm very far behind even scanning
the Tuning digests that accumulated while I was gone and I came down
with a wicked cold this week.
Even so, I'd like to add to the discussion on the champions of various
ET's begun by Joe Monzo and Paul Erlich. It is rather difficult to
assign priority of advocacy in many cases, in part because different
authors advocate the same tuning for quite different reasons as Paul
Erlich has pointed out with respect to Yasser and 19-tet. Another
problem is the accessibility of some of the theoretical works,
particularly those not in English for most North Americans. Having said
this, I would make the following additions to Joe's list.

ET Date Theorist/composer

17 1929 Malherbe
1935 Karapetyan

19 1835 Wesley Woolhouse
1925 Ariel
1930 Kornerup
1932 Joseph Yasser
1961 M. Joel Mandelbaum's dissertation and compositions.
1979 Yunik & Swift

22 1877 Bosanquet
1962 Kraehenbuehl and Schmidt
1960's Ervin Wilson (theory, instruments).
1960's onward Ivor Darreg (instruments, improvisations)
1998 Paul Erlich

24 1906 Stein (first published 24-tet scores)
1917 Moellendorff
1924 Carrillo
1933 Wyschnegradsky
1927? Haba

53 1608 Nicolaus Mercator
1876 Bosanquet (its good thirds and fifths)

Mandelbaum's dissertation, "Multiple Division of the Octave and the
Tonal Resources of 19-tone Temperament," is the definitive work on
19-tet and is an excellent source for the history of alternative
tunings. J.M. Barbour's "Tuning and Temperament" is also very useful.
Ellis's appendices to Helmholtz's "On the Sensations of Tone" are still
very useful for early references.

See Brian McLaren's pages at
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/mclaren/biblio.htm
for a comprehensive bibliography on microtonal music.

For the harmonic properties of ET's with 13 to 24 tones incl., Easley
Blackwood's recording and articles should be consulted.

--John

John Chalmers' list of advocates of 22-tone equal temperament included

> 1962 Kraehenbuehl and Schmidt

Once again, Kraehenbuehl and Schmidt did not mention equal temperament
at all in their paper. They dealt stricly with just intonation. True,
they allowed for inflections of their 22-tone just intonation scale, but
these were to other JI pitches. Also, they saw 22 as part of an
evolutionary series: 7->12->22->41->78, the number of notes in their JI
scales of the 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13-prime limit. It so happens that these
are all important ETs except 78.

Shouldn't Salinas be listed as an advocate of 19-tone equal temperament,
some 300 years before Woolhouse?

Thanks for the additions to the table, John.
(see TD 74). Some of these theorists's
writings are indeed quite inaccessible.

Of course, let's not forget that Ivor Darreg
and Brian McLaren have championed DOZENS
of different ETs, particularly by writing lots
of pieces in them!

- Monzo
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