On Sep 25, 2009, at 4:54 PM, Roman Turovsky wrote: Them Egyptians had no tools to build pyramids either. Etruscans had no tools to build the city wall of Amelia. However we have those walls, and some early music playable only in ET.
Your analogy is rather less solid than the pyramids. The notion that some early music is playable only in ET is based not on physical evidence, but an assumption grounded only on your own liking for intonation which is never perfect but never weird. The odd thing about that assumption is that we now live in era in which everyone in the West is taught a tuning system in which intonation is never perfect but never weird, and yet the music most people listen to departs from that system constantly, usually to achieve something outside the box. Singers slide in and out of the ET norm (deliberately in the case of Sinatra or Freddie Mercury, maybe accidentally in the case of Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison) and guitarists pull notes all over their their ET-fretted instruments. Gregor Piatigorsky once complained "Someone sent me some Beatles albums and I found that they didn't sing in tune." There were millions of other listeners who didn't seem to mind. I don't know if Arto has really disproved that the pyramids exist, but I think you have proved the non-existence of Jimi Hendrix and B.B. King. I rather like those excursions into weirdness when those cento variations or whatever by Frescobaldi or Storace go into remote keys. *(1903-1976) a leading cellist of his day. I actually found the interview, which I originally read in the Los Angeles Times in 1972, at: http://news.google.com/newspapers? nid50&dat720709&id=oHEUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BQIEAAAAIBAJ&pgP93,3450033 -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
