"N. Andrew Walsh" <n.andrew.wa...@gmail.com> writes: > It is entirely acceptable to be a music hobbyist who enjoys a passing > familiarity with the classical tradition and is largely uninterested > in more … esoteric discussions of theory. It is absolutely *not* all > right to be spreading historical inaccuracies of this sort. The WTC is > extensively researched and discussed in musicological and historical > circles, sometimes heatedly, but the idea that Bach wrote it to prove > that Well Temperament sounded "awful" (or the much worse assertion, > that he wrote it to demonstrate *equal* temperament, a technological > and historical impossibility in the 18th century)
Don't be silly. Equal temperament most certainly is not "technologically impossible". Tuners of organs and accordions versed in their art work by tuning a circle of fifths in a reference octave by getting the proper sequence of beatings corresponding to the desired temperament, then tune the other octaves in reference. Meantone temperament is a bit different in that you walk a "circle of major thirds" and distribute the tuning error across certain thirds instead of across certain fifths like most well-tempered tunings do, or even across _all_ fifths like equal temperant does. Electronic tuners have been around for much much shorter times and are usually not employed by experts since they waste the tuner's precision on _absolute_ pitch references rather than the _relative_ references important to hearing because they cause the beat frequencies. If you get a fifth off by 0.5cent, the beating to one of its neighboring fifths will be almost double (5/3) the beatings to its other neighboring fifths, assuming those are totally accurate. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
