source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 07:21:51 -0800 Subject: Re: TUNING digest 619 - Jorgensen book From: "Laurence W. Key" Dear Neil, I helped Owen Jorgensen get the "Tuning" book ready for publication. It could have been much longer, but the author chose to limit himself to English language sources. The *technology* needed to tune 12ET was certainly available much earlier than the turn of this century, and the mathematical understanding of 12ET has been with us for three centuries (or more). But the ability to prove 12ET strictly by ear, by comparing the beat speeds of adjacent intervals, was not common until the early years of this century. Part of the problem was inertia. Piano tuners did not use the harmonic series as a tool, as they do today. They prefered the results of the older methods, which were based on a melodic comparison of intervals. Owen Jorgensen is not on line, but I'm sure he would appreciate any correspondence on matters of tuning. His address is: 3806 U.S. 2 West Moran, MI 49760-9719 Laurence W. Key (flute001@peabody.jhu.edu) 1 East Mount Vernon Place Baltimore, Maryland 21202 Phone: (410) 659-4009 Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 1 Feb 1996 18:01 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id JAA28946; Thu, 1 Feb 1996 09:01:05 -0800 Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 09:01:05 -0800 Message-Id: <0099D457568E7C87.96B4@ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu