EQ temps

Interesting...I was sitting here tonite, listening to Bach lute suites (played by Sharon Isbin), and reading Reinhard's 1987 essay on well temperaments from Pitch mag, and it just sort of hit me how unnatural tempered tuning systems are. I mean, you really gotta jump through a lot of hoops and do a lot of messing around with the harmonic series to get to a tempered system...again, it's not a natural sort of phenomenon. But, a lot of profound music has been produced using this concept. In fact, without temps, Western music as we know it wouldn't exist, which isn't exactly news. And all to play chordally based music...which, again, isn't really found anywhere in nature (a chorus of birds singing in harmony is a nice cartoon scene), and was not used in any music of any culture in the world (practically speaking, probably were some rudimentary chords here and there) until the Euros started doing it. I love classical, jazz, blues, and all the other "Western" forms of music, but it's enlightening to realize that they are all based off of a way of tuning intervals that is totally man made, and which completely changes the way the intervals were intended to be heard by Nature...HHH
PS...Reinhard, said essay is very well written, I've given it to numerous students of mine...