I think Baroque musicians were well aware of the equal temperament because it's an extreme case of meantone temperament where the comma is spread across all fifths. It's just that it wasn't the preferred choice for the type of music they wrote. Every instrument has its own timbre and I think organs and harpsichords sound better and more resonant if 1/4 or 1/6 comma meantone temperament is used (assuming that the composer is aware of its limitations). Of course modern music assumes equal temperament and that's what should be used. But I wouldn't say that it's necessarily "better" just more convenient. The interval which is naturally less "stable" (the major 3rd) is sacrificed to make it work but we gain the ability to modulate freely.
Technically "equal temperament" is (a) meantone temperament. It's approximately 1/11th comma meantone. Also, there's nothing stopping all 12 (or more!) keys from sounding good in different kinds of meantone tunings, you just need more notes on your piano per octave.
Meantone chords sounded so much better than equal (when there was less than one black key) because each chord had its own identity and each had smooth "pearly" intervals which sounded gorgeous. Equal temperament was too samey and stale in comparison. But I understand the necessity for equal temperament in pieces which use a lot of chromatic notes.
Debating which temperament is most pleasing are most interesting is pointless because it comes down to personal preference. But without any doubt whatsoever, something that is diatonic and in the key of C major is going to have a radically different sound in mean tone than in equal temperament. It is also a fact that in the meantone system each chord is going to have a different sound. If you prefer that sound, equal temperament is like going into a store that has 100 different flavors of ice cream and then picking vanilla. My only point was that in music that is highly chromatic and that moves freely among all 12 keys, any tuning system that makes each key sound terribly different is going to present huge problems. If you move from a C minor chord to an A flat major chord, where there are two common tones, when you end up on an A flat major chord it is just awful. If you stay there a while before moving back to C minor, it's very logical to use a D flat major chord as your IV chord in that temporary key of A flat major. And that D flat major chord is going to sound horrendous. There is a very good reason why JS Bach was looking for some kind of solution that was easier on the ears when he wrote his preludes and fugues in all keys. We can debate which system he preferred, but we know that he could not have been using a severe mean tone temperament because some of those preludes and fugues sound ghastly in that system.
@@garydlloyd7718 What is your opinion on what temperament Bach used? I always thought there was an overwhelming amount of evidence for him using his own well temperament, but what do you think?
@@rafexrafexowski4754 Bradley Lehman looked at the decorative squiggly line across the title page of Bach’s copy of the Well Tempered Clavier and interpreted it as representing a temperament. He then tuned his harpsichord in accordance with his interpretation, and it actually sounds (to my ears, at least) very nice and works for every key. It’s typically called the Bach/Lehman temperament.
People knew about 12 tone equal temperament in both Europe and China at least as far back as the 1500s -- they just didn't care for it much (although it is possible to find pipe organs dating back to the late 1600s tuned in it -- some organ in the Netherlands comes to mind that I can't remember the name of, but it is also notable for having a pedal mutation stop that goes lower than its lowest unison/octave stop). Well temperaments that were intermediate between meantone and equal temperament persisted all the way into the 1800s, long enough for Sergei Rachmaninoff to claim he was first trained on a well-tempered piano rather than one tuned in equal temperament, and definitely long enough for Beethoven and Chopin to be writing for well-tempered pianos, even with Chopin's extensive use of the flat/sharp keys. For earlier music, although most keyboard instruments had only 12 notes per octave, some harpsichords and even a rare subset of pipe organs had split flat/sharp keys to enable key signature modulation and even enharmonic playing while using meantone, and some theorists of the time (and later) proposed systems using more than 12 equal divisions of the octave. The most extreme examples known are the arcicembalo and arciorgano of Nicola Valentino of the 1500s -- these had 36 keys per octave, split onto 2 manuals of 19 and 17 notes, but unfortunately the ergonomics turned out to be terrible (as you can see in videos of these instruments being played). More practical harpsichords have been built with 19, 24, or 31 notes per octave (of which videos are also floating around on TH-cam). If only we had stuck with harpsichords, and continued with experiments to give them dynamics . . . the piano stole the show from the harpsichord on the basis of having better dynamic control (but at the expense of possibility for variations of timbre), but has a much more complicated and bulky mechanism that is not well suited to building for more than 12 notes per octave. _Maybe_ you could get 17 notes per octave in without having to sacrifice strings per note (normally 3 except in the bass, although 4 is a possibility exercised in a few instruments), but from photos and videos of pianos having 24 notes per octave, it is evident that either you have to sacrifice strings per note or go to 2 levels (resulting in a humongous instrument), and the designs of the 1930s for this (as sometimes used by Ivan Wyschnegradsky) had not very good ergonomics (better than the arcicembalo and arciorgano, but worse than the above-mentioned other microtonal harpsichords). The Fokker organ of 1951 has 31 notes per octave (in 31 equal temperament, which is approximately 20/83-comma meantone) and at least in principle more ergonomic keyboards and pedalboard, but unfortunately has bad timbre and not much in the way of anything you can do to fix it except by blending it with a choir (or in principle other instruments, but I haven't heard that yet). Of course, the other problem is that adding more notes per octave on an acoustic instrument -- especially a pipe organ -- is extremely expensive, which is probably the main reason it never gained much traction even in the harpsichord era. The real explosion in use of more than 12 notes per octave has come in the last couple of decades, when synthesized sound that sounds good has become available at an affordable price, along with isomorphic/generalized keyboards that actually have decent ergonomics (for those who want to play the music themselves as opposed to using software to sequence it -- although software sequencing is certainly a valid way of getting around the ergonomics problem, especially if you want the sound of something like woodwind or brass instruments that would need an awful lot of keys or valves to get more notes per octave).
This video is poorly informed. 12edo (equal temperament) is a meantone tuning, and so are many other edos. 19edo, 26edo, and most notably 31edo are a few edos/temperaments that also support meantone and don't run into the problem you discussed in your video because they're not limited to a 12-note subset. Of course if you use a 12-note subset of meantone then you're gonna get a few wolf intervals, but with edos/temperaments like 19, 31, among others, you can have purer triadic and tetradic harmony than in 12edo, and not have to worry about needing to use wolf intervals since it's an equal temperament, but it'd still be meantone and sound great- better than 12edo. I'm not an expert microtonalist but I've compared meantones and found that 1/4 comma meantone, which is very well approximated by 31edo, is about ideal for both triadic and especially tetradic harmony (like being able to use the 4:5:6:7 chord, the meat and potatoes of barbershop harmony, which is absent in 12edo). 19edo also has smoother major and minor triads than 12edo but doesn't have a good seventh harmonic.
My tuner always plays a bit when he's done. Next time he's here I'll request that he play the entire well tempered work by Bach! 😂. I know him well enough I know for certain he'd tell me to go to hell with a grin. He's almost 90 so he's free to say anything he wishes
I am quitte sure that Bach’s « well tempered » tuning wasn’t equal temperament. He wrote his WTK to demonstrate the different colors of different keys !
Personally I would make sure every key sounds good first and foremost. I wouldnt tolerate a wolf interval. That said I love the mathematically correct sound of mean tone so I would pick my favorite range of keys which is G major to F# or "sharp" keys and have them mathematically correct and then evening the wolf chord among the flat keys C to Db it would depend how evened out it sounds so I could experiment and try to make more chords mean tone (C-Bb or Db-Eb) , it would depend on the sound results
Temperaments Sound very different on « percussion instruments » like piano and « sustained tones » instruments…. Equal temperament on a piano is ok, but would be almost unbearable on an pipe organ - or a string ensemble, for that matter, at least for consonant music styles.
2,295E-6 it is the maximum standard deviation that we obtain among all the intervals ratio of a scale with equal temperament. 1,904E-3 for Pythagorean scale, any other way of constructing the scale gives a result between these two extremes. equal temperament is therefore the most stable and the most compatible for transposition as well as for large ensemble orchestration.
The mean tone sound good without the four chords with black notes and its good to hear that the tuners are tryna make the bumps in the worst keys get smother it will be more fun to play with all keys perfect.
That piano you made that recording on sounds familiar.. ;o). Seriously now, after listening to this, one realizes 1) how monumental getting to Equal Temperament was, and how monumental Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is.
Yes. This piano sounds very familiar! (I used Wakko's Roland for meantone.) LOL In fairness, if you stay away from the keys with so many black notes, some music in mean tone and other systems sounds pretty interesting to me. I suppose the best way we can describe what's happening is to stay away from math and just stay with common sense. It's pretty obvious that when you tamper with some keys hoping to make them better, it's going to seriously screw up other keys when we are dealing with a keyboard instrument with fixed tuning. In contrast, when you listen to vocal music where you can apply these principles to any key, I think the preference for older systems in nuch older music is pretty logical and 100% defensible. There are also places in traditional orchestral pieces where players lower the third and raise the 5th for pure sounds where the result is pretty amazing. For example, if you have the trombones playing an F major chord, if they raise the C to a beatless 5th and then lower the A to a beatless third, it really does sound better in certain situations.
Although you picked 4 chords that really do sound bad in 1/4 comma meantone, i didn't really love the sounds of those chords - or any major chord - in equal temperament either. As one Turkish classical musician Cinuçen Tanrıkorur once pointed out, thirds in Western equal temperament are quite a mess if you actually listen to them critically.
Some modern digitals (say.. 2010 and newer) can do that. Roland's V-Piano and derivatives can tune each and every string in a given unison, just like a real piano. And if you mess up, hit "RESET" and instantly fix it. You can even change the material the strings are made of. Change the hardness of the hammers. Amazing stuff. Mine's dumb tho -- it's a 2007 HP201 and all it can do is change temperaments.
Wow… I remember watching an Adam Neely video on tuning. This just gives me even MORE insight on tuning. I can't believe that music has changed so much that Mean tones today sound absolutely horrendous today.
This video is somewhat misleading, even though it contains good information as well. Equal temperament was not always "the goal" of tuning systems. It's versatile, but it has pretty bad 3rds (14 cents too sharp) and the fact that all key sound the same was not always considered desirable! This is just a cognitive bias that you have because equal temperament is more familiar to you.
It depends upon what kind of music you prefer, listen to and compose. For music that is highly chromatic -meaning music that is treating all keys as equal because you are just as likely to be in any of them at any moment - on a keyboard instrument with fixed tuning, those thirds that you are objecting to are going to be way worse than 14 cents off in some keys. If you are comfortable with that, fine. I am not, so what we are talking about is taste, not facts.
@@garydlloyd7718 Obviously mean tone is not meant for highly chromatic music. But it's the other way around: this tuning was favored in the context of music that was not highly chromatic. Objectively though, the chords that are "in tune" in mean tone are much purer than their 12 EDO counterpart. Also, the goal of developing temperaments was not always to reach ET. For example in equal temperament, you lose the expressivity of a diminished 4th (G# C for instance) that you can render very well in mean tone temperament. The thing is, this video presents the two systems as one being clearly superior to the other, which is not really a cutting edge representation of the current talks about tuning systems.
I think more consideration should be given to what temperament the composer preferred. Discussions of tunings without specific song titles or composer names are nonsense.
Today, with everything tuned in equal temperament, there is no artistic reason to go to other keys since all keys sound alike. Pick the key that’s best for the range you need. Of course, if you are modulating to all keys, you need to have your instrument tuned to sound good in all of them, not because you like the sound of any particular key, but because you want to modulate. But in Bach’s day, composers wrote in particular keys because each key had its own unique sound, even on keyboard instruments, much like the guitar sounds different in each key because of the different combination of strings which form the chords. So in Bach’s day a keyboard instrument would not be tuned to equal temperament because the keys would all sound the same. Instead, some form of unequal temperament was used, which would allow all keys to be playable, yet the most comonly played keys would sound really nice while the less common keys would sound rougher. This was frequently used for setting the mood of the piece, where for instance a rough key would sound sad while a smooth one would sound happy. Modern equal temperament destroys all of this distinction between keys, and so it should not be used to play music from time periods where equal temperament was not used. I also think that equal temperament ought to go the way of the dodo, because there are better options. It certainly does not need any apologists! The best way I can describe the sound of equal temperament is, *boring.*
@@garydlloyd7718 The music itself may be interesting, but equal temperament is always boring. That is why nobody talks about equal temperament other than technically. There is nothing to be said for it artistically.
Bravo. You've demonstrated that mean tone tuning doesn't work in keys distant from its tuning center. But not a word about how equal temperament gives us thirds in all keys that are harsh and dissonant. I have no quarrel with equal temperament, it's a great system for highly modulated music. But it's not the _summum bonum._
I think Baroque musicians were well aware of the equal temperament because it's an extreme case of meantone temperament where the comma is spread across all fifths. It's just that it wasn't the preferred choice for the type of music they wrote. Every instrument has its own timbre and I think organs and harpsichords sound better and more resonant if 1/4 or 1/6 comma meantone temperament is used (assuming that the composer is aware of its limitations). Of course modern music assumes equal temperament and that's what should be used. But I wouldn't say that it's necessarily "better" just more convenient. The interval which is naturally less "stable" (the major 3rd) is sacrificed to make it work but we gain the ability to modulate freely.
I think we have to consider the music we are playing before we pick a tuning system.
Technically "equal temperament" is (a) meantone temperament. It's approximately 1/11th comma meantone.
Also, there's nothing stopping all 12 (or more!) keys from sounding good in different kinds of meantone tunings, you just need more notes on your piano per octave.
More keys per octave on a keyboard than 12 is highly impractical for the people that I teach.
Meantone chords sounded so much better than equal (when there was less than one black key) because each chord had its own identity and each had smooth "pearly" intervals which sounded gorgeous. Equal temperament was too samey and stale in comparison. But I understand the necessity for equal temperament in pieces which use a lot of chromatic notes.
Debating which temperament is most pleasing are most interesting is pointless because it comes down to personal preference. But without any doubt whatsoever, something that is diatonic and in the key of C major is going to have a radically different sound in mean tone than in equal temperament.
It is also a fact that in the meantone system each chord is going to have a different sound. If you prefer that sound, equal temperament is like going into a store that has 100 different flavors of ice cream and then picking vanilla.
My only point was that in music that is highly chromatic and that moves freely among all 12 keys, any tuning system that makes each key sound terribly different is going to present huge problems. If you move from a C minor chord to an A flat major chord, where there are two common tones, when you end up on an A flat major chord it is just awful. If you stay there a while before moving back to C minor, it's very logical to use a D flat major chord as your IV chord in that temporary key of A flat major. And that D flat major chord is going to sound horrendous.
There is a very good reason why JS Bach was looking for some kind of solution that was easier on the ears when he wrote his preludes and fugues in all keys. We can debate which system he preferred, but we know that he could not have been using a severe mean tone temperament because some of those preludes and fugues sound ghastly in that system.
@@garydlloyd7718 What is your opinion on what temperament Bach used? I always thought there was an overwhelming amount of evidence for him using his own well temperament, but what do you think?
@@rafexrafexowski4754 Bradley Lehman looked at the decorative squiggly line across the title page of Bach’s copy of the Well Tempered Clavier and interpreted it as representing a temperament. He then tuned his harpsichord in accordance with his interpretation, and it actually sounds (to my ears, at least) very nice and works for every key. It’s typically called the Bach/Lehman temperament.
People knew about 12 tone equal temperament in both Europe and China at least as far back as the 1500s -- they just didn't care for it much (although it is possible to find pipe organs dating back to the late 1600s tuned in it -- some organ in the Netherlands comes to mind that I can't remember the name of, but it is also notable for having a pedal mutation stop that goes lower than its lowest unison/octave stop). Well temperaments that were intermediate between meantone and equal temperament persisted all the way into the 1800s, long enough for Sergei Rachmaninoff to claim he was first trained on a well-tempered piano rather than one tuned in equal temperament, and definitely long enough for Beethoven and Chopin to be writing for well-tempered pianos, even with Chopin's extensive use of the flat/sharp keys.
For earlier music, although most keyboard instruments had only 12 notes per octave, some harpsichords and even a rare subset of pipe organs had split flat/sharp keys to enable key signature modulation and even enharmonic playing while using meantone, and some theorists of the time (and later) proposed systems using more than 12 equal divisions of the octave. The most extreme examples known are the arcicembalo and arciorgano of Nicola Valentino of the 1500s -- these had 36 keys per octave, split onto 2 manuals of 19 and 17 notes, but unfortunately the ergonomics turned out to be terrible (as you can see in videos of these instruments being played). More practical harpsichords have been built with 19, 24, or 31 notes per octave (of which videos are also floating around on TH-cam). If only we had stuck with harpsichords, and continued with experiments to give them dynamics . . . the piano stole the show from the harpsichord on the basis of having better dynamic control (but at the expense of possibility for variations of timbre), but has a much more complicated and bulky mechanism that is not well suited to building for more than 12 notes per octave.
_Maybe_ you could get 17 notes per octave in without having to sacrifice strings per note (normally 3 except in the bass, although 4 is a possibility exercised in a few instruments), but from photos and videos of pianos having 24 notes per octave, it is evident that either you have to sacrifice strings per note or go to 2 levels (resulting in a humongous instrument), and the designs of the 1930s for this (as sometimes used by Ivan Wyschnegradsky) had not very good ergonomics (better than the arcicembalo and arciorgano, but worse than the above-mentioned other microtonal harpsichords). The Fokker organ of 1951 has 31 notes per octave (in 31 equal temperament, which is approximately 20/83-comma meantone) and at least in principle more ergonomic keyboards and pedalboard, but unfortunately has bad timbre and not much in the way of anything you can do to fix it except by blending it with a choir (or in principle other instruments, but I haven't heard that yet).
Of course, the other problem is that adding more notes per octave on an acoustic instrument -- especially a pipe organ -- is extremely expensive, which is probably the main reason it never gained much traction even in the harpsichord era. The real explosion in use of more than 12 notes per octave has come in the last couple of decades, when synthesized sound that sounds good has become available at an affordable price, along with isomorphic/generalized keyboards that actually have decent ergonomics (for those who want to play the music themselves as opposed to using software to sequence it -- although software sequencing is certainly a valid way of getting around the ergonomics problem, especially if you want the sound of something like woodwind or brass instruments that would need an awful lot of keys or valves to get more notes per octave).
There is a lot to think about here.
This video is poorly informed. 12edo (equal temperament) is a meantone tuning, and so are many other edos. 19edo, 26edo, and most notably 31edo are a few edos/temperaments that also support meantone and don't run into the problem you discussed in your video because they're not limited to a 12-note subset. Of course if you use a 12-note subset of meantone then you're gonna get a few wolf intervals, but with edos/temperaments like 19, 31, among others, you can have purer triadic and tetradic harmony than in 12edo, and not have to worry about needing to use wolf intervals since it's an equal temperament, but it'd still be meantone and sound great- better than 12edo.
I'm not an expert microtonalist but I've compared meantones and found that 1/4 comma meantone, which is very well approximated by 31edo, is about ideal for both triadic and especially tetradic harmony (like being able to use the 4:5:6:7 chord, the meat and potatoes of barbershop harmony, which is absent in 12edo). 19edo also has smoother major and minor triads than 12edo but doesn't have a good seventh harmonic.
Thanks for sharing...
Equal temperament did not sound much better. It still sounded out of tune, but just more sharp
I have no idea what your point is.
Playing the Well-Tempered Clavier seems a cool way to check if one's keyboard is well-tuned!
That may be true.
My tuner always plays a bit when he's done. Next time he's here I'll request that he play the entire well tempered work by Bach! 😂. I know him well enough I know for certain he'd tell me to go to hell with a grin. He's almost 90 so he's free to say anything he wishes
I am quitte sure that Bach’s « well tempered » tuning wasn’t equal temperament. He wrote his WTK to demonstrate the different colors of different keys !
Personally I would make sure every key sounds good first and foremost. I wouldnt tolerate a wolf interval. That said I love the mathematically correct sound of mean tone so I would pick my favorite range of keys which is G major to F# or "sharp" keys and have them mathematically correct and then evening the wolf chord among the flat keys C to Db
it would depend how evened out it sounds so I could experiment and try to make more chords mean tone (C-Bb or Db-Eb) , it would depend on the sound results
Everyone has a different idea about tuning systems.
Temperaments Sound very different on « percussion instruments » like piano and « sustained tones » instruments…. Equal temperament on a piano is ok, but would be almost unbearable on an pipe organ - or a string ensemble, for that matter, at least for consonant music styles.
Everything changes when you are dealing with instruments that do not have fixed tuning.
2,295E-6 it is the maximum standard deviation that we obtain among all the intervals ratio of a scale with equal temperament. 1,904E-3 for Pythagorean scale, any other way of constructing the scale gives a result between these two extremes. equal temperament is therefore the most stable and the most compatible for transposition as well as for large ensemble orchestration.
The only thing I know is that the better you make key sound, the worse some other key is going to sound.
The mean tone sound good without the four chords with black notes and its good to hear that the tuners are tryna make the bumps in the worst keys get smother it will be more fun to play with all keys perfect.
For me it is shocking how bad that sounds in those four problem keys.
Why do i actually kinda love the out of tune sound of quarter comma meantone
Different strokes for different folks.
That piano you made that recording on sounds familiar.. ;o). Seriously now, after listening to this, one realizes 1) how monumental getting to Equal Temperament was, and how monumental Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is.
Yes. This piano sounds very familiar! (I used Wakko's Roland for meantone.) LOL
In fairness, if you stay away from the keys with so many black notes, some music in mean tone and other systems sounds pretty interesting to me. I suppose the best way we can describe what's happening is to stay away from math and just stay with common sense. It's pretty obvious that when you tamper with some keys hoping to make them better, it's going to seriously screw up other keys when we are dealing with a keyboard instrument with fixed tuning.
In contrast, when you listen to vocal music where you can apply these principles to any key, I think the preference for older systems in nuch older music is pretty logical and 100% defensible.
There are also places in traditional orchestral pieces where players lower the third and raise the 5th for pure sounds where the result is pretty amazing. For example, if you have the trombones playing an F major chord, if they raise the C to a beatless 5th and then lower the A to a beatless third, it really does sound better in certain situations.
Although you picked 4 chords that really do sound bad in 1/4 comma meantone, i didn't really love the sounds of those chords - or any major chord - in equal temperament either. As one Turkish classical musician Cinuçen Tanrıkorur once pointed out, thirds in Western equal temperament are quite a mess if you actually listen to them critically.
It's all a matter of perspective.
It's the best compromise for an instrument where you cannot tune the notes individually because everything comes pre-tuned.
That's very true!
Some modern digitals (say.. 2010 and newer) can do that. Roland's V-Piano and derivatives can tune each and every string in a given unison, just like a real piano. And if you mess up, hit "RESET" and instantly fix it. You can even change the material the strings are made of. Change the hardness of the hammers. Amazing stuff. Mine's dumb tho -- it's a 2007 HP201 and all it can do is change temperaments.
Wow… I remember watching an Adam Neely video on tuning. This just gives me even MORE insight on tuning. I can't believe that music has changed so much that Mean tones today sound absolutely horrendous today.
That tuning system always sounded horrible when you played all black keys.
I am learning so much from viewing your videos. By listening today I learned about mean tone tuning versus equal temperament.
Well, at least now you know why we use equal temperament.
This video is somewhat misleading, even though it contains good information as well.
Equal temperament was not always "the goal" of tuning systems. It's versatile, but it has pretty bad 3rds (14 cents too sharp) and the fact that all key sound the same was not always considered desirable! This is just a cognitive bias that you have because equal temperament is more familiar to you.
It depends upon what kind of music you prefer, listen to and compose. For music that is highly chromatic -meaning music that is treating all keys as equal because you are just as likely to be in any of them at any moment - on a keyboard instrument with fixed tuning, those thirds that you are objecting to are going to be way worse than 14 cents off in some keys. If you are comfortable with that, fine. I am not, so what we are talking about is taste, not facts.
@@garydlloyd7718 Obviously mean tone is not meant for highly chromatic music. But it's the other way around: this tuning was favored in the context of music that was not highly chromatic.
Objectively though, the chords that are "in tune" in mean tone are much purer than their 12 EDO counterpart. Also, the goal of developing temperaments was not always to reach ET. For example in equal temperament, you lose the expressivity of a diminished 4th (G# C for instance) that you can render very well in mean tone temperament.
The thing is, this video presents the two systems as one being clearly superior to the other, which is not really a cutting edge representation of the current talks about tuning systems.
Noted...
Was not expecting the equal temperament to make those 4 chords sound that much better.
I know. The difference is amazing.
I think more consideration should be given to what temperament the composer preferred. Discussions of tunings without specific song titles or composer names are nonsense.
Not everyone has the time to delve into tunings as you have on you site.
Today, with everything tuned in equal temperament, there is no artistic reason to go to other keys since all keys sound alike. Pick the key that’s best for the range you need. Of course, if you are modulating to all keys, you need to have your instrument tuned to sound good in all of them, not because you like the sound of any particular key, but because you want to modulate. But in Bach’s day, composers wrote in particular keys because each key had its own unique sound, even on keyboard instruments, much like the guitar sounds different in each key because of the different combination of strings which form the chords. So in Bach’s day a keyboard instrument would not be tuned to equal temperament because the keys would all sound the same. Instead, some form of unequal temperament was used, which would allow all keys to be playable, yet the most comonly played keys would sound really nice while the less common keys would sound rougher. This was frequently used for setting the mood of the piece, where for instance a rough key would sound sad while a smooth one would sound happy. Modern equal temperament destroys all of this distinction between keys, and so it should not be used to play music from time periods where equal temperament was not used. I also think that equal temperament ought to go the way of the dodo, because there are better options. It certainly does not need any apologists! The best way I can describe the sound of equal temperament is, *boring.*
I agree with most of what you said. I do not believe that equal temperament is boring when used for music that is rapidly moving through all 12 keys.
@@garydlloyd7718 The music itself may be interesting, but equal temperament is always boring. That is why nobody talks about equal temperament other than technically. There is nothing to be said for it artistically.
Bravo. You've demonstrated that mean tone tuning doesn't work in keys distant from its tuning center. But not a word about how equal temperament gives us thirds in all keys that are harsh and dissonant.
I have no quarrel with equal temperament, it's a great system for highly modulated music. But it's not the _summum bonum._
I think you are taking what I wrote way too seriously.
@@garydlloyd7718 No doubt. But I think that just dumping on mean tone tuning is not really fair.