source file: m1399.txt
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 1998 11:38:46 -0700

Subject: Re: Difficulties in Piano Construction

From: alves@orion.ac.hmc.edu (Bill Alves)

>Several books I have read say that one of the largest reasons for the
>popularity of Equal Temperament in western music is that the most
>prominent piano manufacturers all decided to make pianos in ET, and that
>constructing a JI piano creates some serious mechanical difficulties.
>However, the books have never mentioned what these mechanical difficulties
>are.  Does anyone have any input on this question?

I, too, have expressed some puzzlement on this forum about Brian McLaren's
and Lou Harrison's claim that the industrialization of piano manufacture
necessitated equal temperament. There are no "mechanical difficulties" that
I am aware of that would preclude tunings, as long as the tunings are not
so far out as to break the strings or make them too loose. In fact, some
people, including myself, have tuned pianos to JI.

If anything, JI is *much* easier to tune than equal temperament, though it
is compromised on the piano by the chorusing of double and triple course
piano strings, which are detuned slightly to aid the resonance. This is why
La Monte Young's piano has only single courses, for example. I believe that
piano manufacturers began using multiple courses in the nineteenth century,
but I don't know for sure. Also, Jorgensen (in _Tuning_) calls into doubt
whether precise equal temperament was likely or even possible before the
twentieth century. In any case, the choice in the nineteenth century was
not between JI and equal temperament, but between equal temperament and
other irregular or circulating temperaments.

I think what Lou means, perhaps, is that industrialization necessitated
standardization, and that equal temperament is the tuning that the most
people object to the least. If I may be permitted a stretch of a comparison
to the product of media industrialization of our own time -- television --
equal temperament took compromise to its logical extreme, sacrificing
(among other things) the beauties of individual expressions to mass-market
functionality.

Bill

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