Everyone concerned

Kyle writes:

>It does seem to me that, as long as you are conditioned to hear only
>the fundamentals and filter out the beats, any tuning can sound fine.
>But once you've conditioned yourself to hear the interaction of
>partials, as a piano tuner does, certain combinations begin to grate
>on you, especially if there's no sensitivity to where in the music
>they appear.

Greetings,
I agree with Kyle, the return to ET from "somewhere more consonant" is
often a rather jarring landing. I have put this effect to good use in my
temperament lecture/presentation/dare that I give to piano technician's
conventions and chapter meetings, (last was the Canadian organization, next
is the PTG national in Dallas).
I had previously simply used a well-tempered piano to demonstrate the
composers' use of various keys for different effects. Beginning in G
(usually Bach's French suite stuff), then contrasting that with something in
Ab to demo how different thing were on opposite sides of the circle of
fifths, I was able to 'attune' the ears to the different tonal qualities
found. For the remainder of the 90 minutes or so, we walked around the keys,
listening to what happened to music in them. Then, in Texas several years
ago, there were two concert pianos on stage and one had been left in ET. At
the end of the program, one of the techs stood up and said, "OK, let's hear
that last piece on the ET piano". We rolled it out and listened. The crowd
was amazed at how out of tune it sounded, and it was a very clean ET!
Since then, I have used this comparison repeatedly, and the results are
the same, everytime. I warn the group that I intend to shift their
perspective in 90 minutes. (Piano tuners tend to be square pegs, and I
notice more than a few backs stiffen, arms cross, and eyebrows go up). Then
we listen first to the ET piano, and it is easy to get everyone to agree that
it sounds fine. Pushing the 13.7 cent thirds aside for the next hour and a
half, we take a tonality tour. When we return to the once fine sounding ET,
the epiphanies pile up on top of themselves. It is like shooting fish in a
barrell.
On the piano, the use of a well-temperament is also a strong factor in
how much pedal can be employed. Pianists have all learned that the original
pedal markings of the classical composers can't be used on the modern piano
because the increased sustain "muddies" the music. However, what we are
finding is that the ever-present haze of tempering in ET is what is doing the
roiling, and when something like a Young or a Prelleur, or even a Kirnberger
is used, the pedal can be held down far longer and still allow clarity. And,
the more pedal that is used, the more resonance the instrument can produce.
This is usually a good thing.
It is an ongoing project to determine why there is a sense of increased
clarity in the WT's. Even the keys more highly tempered than ET seem to be
"richer" sounding, when my logic would have told me that the modern listener
would sense them as harsher. Perhaps it was the genius of Beethoven, Haydn,
and others that creates this effect, though the jazz players around here are
coming to accept the WT palette as more usable than ET.
I have come to believe that the everpresent use of 12 ET has inured the
modern ear. It has dulled the reception of great music and the musical world
at large is unaware of the loss. In order to accept this tuning, one must
be desensitized to the physical effect of the tonal
palette,(consonance/dissonance). Once this happens, the music's effect is
left dependant on intellectual interpretation. In contrast, the unequal
tunings create a psycho-emotive effect that is independant of the intellect,
hence, interjecting a greater degree of complexity into the "meaning" of the
music. (Here I use 'meaning' to denote a message being received, not a
unique property of the message, itself.) This is new territory for many that
have spent their lives with old music, but there IS an awakening going on in
the piano world.
We got to the domination of ET rather slowly, it is quite an eye-opener
to most musicians to go back to the well-tempered world all at once, but once
succesfully taken there, they rarely want to come back.
Regards,
Ed Foote
Nashville, Tn.