BIOS Reporter – Volume 29, No.1 – January 2005

A chance remark, made over three fine harpsichords, on a topic much researched in the past three decades as equal temperament has been called to account. The consensus that equal temperament became the dominant tuning as the nineteenth century progressed may have ignored something peculiar to the organ and the harp. Of all instruments in general use after 1800, they were the only two to be tuned in true equal temperament, the piano employing a necessarily stretched version, while the romantic orchestra learned to adjust the tuning, assisted in no small measure by blurring the pitch with vibrato, in an ad hoc equal temperament…