source file: m1405.txt
Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 20:27:33 EDT

Subject: Re:  TUNING digest 1404

From: A440A <A440A@aol.com>

Bruce writes:
>Actually it seems to me that the fascination with polyphony along with
>12ET's somewhat universal simplicity, has caused the predominance of
>12TET-- it has taken 250-300 years to somewhat exhaust the rich endowment
>of this tuning. 
 
    If I understand Bruce to mean that ET has been used for 250-300 years, I
must respectfully disagree.  There is more than ample evidence to show that,
while theorized about much earlier,  the use of 12 TET didn't actually come to
prominence before 1850.     
	True, we have evidence that lutes and viols were capable of ET shortly after
the Mersenne ratios were published, (1636?), but Mersenne himself said that
keyboards could not use the numbers because they must be tuned by ear, not
linear measurements.  
    I hope we are not on a semantic loggerhead here, but the tunings that
evolved out of the restrictive meantone tunings were often called "equal" for
their modulatory freedom, but there was distinct differences between the level
of tempering in the various keys.  
Regards, 
Ed Foote 
Precision Piano Works
Nashville, Tn. 
http://www.airtime.co.uk/forte/history/edfoote.html