Stewart McCoy wrote: > I can think of quite a bit of baroque guitar > music which explores remote keys, and where equal temperament would > have to be the order of the day.
But it would not *have* to be anything of the sort, unless you assume that a composer writing in F-sharp major expected it to sound like C major a tritone higher. Some 17th-century keyboard pieces wander into distant keys, and no one who has looked into it suggests that this meant the keyboard was tempered equally. The natural assumption is that the explorations into keys outside the normal ones were supposed to sound weird and outlandish (indeed, "weird" and "outlandish" mean "beyond familiar territory"), making the return to comfortable C or G more pronounced and even dramatic. The urge to tame the distant keys by making the normal keys less in tune has a lot to do with 20th-century listening habits. HP To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
