On 5 Sep 2007 at 14:38, Andrew Stiller wrote: > > On Sep 4, 2007, at 11:31 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > You said "equal temperament" not "well-tempered." They are not even > > close to being the same thing. > > Oh come on. The range of possible temperaments in wh. it is possible to > play musically in every key is a very narrow one, and the difference > *in sound* between well-tempered and equal-tempered is a matter of a > few cents here and there.
Are you crazy? There's a huge difference, because the less you spread out the comma, the more different the leftover keys (i.e., the bad ones) sound in comparison to the "good" keys. > Frankly, this is one issue that I think has > been made far to much of; well-tempered, equal tempered, a be > gezunt---who cares? Yeah, yeah, I know, you do; I don't. I think that anyone who has actually played on instruments with the various temperaments would recognize immediately that equal temperament is a completely different animal than any of the well- temperaments. There are even some mid-19th-century non-equal temperaments that sound incredibly exotic in comparison to ET (3 summers ago I coached chamber music with a piano tuned in this temperament -- I forget the details of what it was -- but it made the key of Ab sound exotic and different, for instance). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
