source file: m1579.txt
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:12:15 EST

Subject: Siberian temperament

From: DFinnamore@aol.com

Here's an anecdote that should be of interest to piano tuners and/or those who
study historical temperaments.

I recently returned from a week-long recording session with the Russian
National Philharmonic Orchestra in the southwestern Siberian city of Tomsk.
Some of the pieces required piano.  They had a nice 9-foot Niendorf there but
it was horribly out of tune.  Guess how many piano tuners there are in Tomsk,
a city of several hundred thousand people - one.  And he shows up (3 hours
late!) with two pieces of equipment: his wrench and a fork at A442.  I kinda
figured right then that things would get interesting.

The (American) composer was not at all happy with the sound of the piano after
it was tuned.  Some keys sounded better than others but none sounded
particularly nice with simple Western triadic music.  I had warned him that it
was not likely to come out in 12t-ET and, boy, was I right.  I wish that I
could have watched the tuner do his work to see what his method was but, alas,
I had other work to do related to the recording process.

Later that evening I had a chance to sit down with it and work through the
cycle of fifths: open, major triads, and minor triads.  My assessment by ear
is that he must have started with the As, then tuned down 3 5ths and up 7,
making each 5th just a hair flat to pure, maybe 701 Hz or so.  That left him
with about 10 or 12 cents of the comma to soak up from the Bb-F-C intervals,
so he split it more-or-less evenly between them, making each of those 5ths
about 5 or 6 cents flat to pure.  That yielded near-Pythagorean "major" triads
over most of the piano, with the Db, Ab, and Eb ones being fairly pure, and
the Bb and F chords sounding nearly intolerable by comparison with the others.
Yikes.

Unfortunately, the conductor, the only person around who was fluent in both
Russian and English, didn't understand enough about keyboard tunings to
translate the terms "mean tone" and "well-temperament," and the tuner didn't
seem to recognize the term Pythagorean nor the names Werkmeister, Kirnberger,
or Young.  So we were stuck with it.

Does anyone recognize the method of tuning I've described?  Does it have a
name?

In the next couple of weeks or so, as I'm editing the recordings, I'm going to
try to find a relatively short snippet of the piano tracks that involves all
12 chromatic notes and make a Real Audio file out of it.  If any of you are
interested in hearing it, please post me off-list and I'll send it out to you
when I have it ready.  I'd appreciate any informed analysis.

David J. Finnamore