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into practical use the system of ET that overcame these problems. ET provided a welcome and necessary solution, and the reason it was so quickly adopted worldwide is because its what most composers and performers wanted. William Braid-White, whose system for tuning ET is the basis for the methods used by all tuners today, wrote Equal Temperament solves the problem of tuning giving full command over all the resources, harmonic and melodic alike, of the pianothis unlimited freedom of sound combination within the accepted keyboardhas given it its established position in practical music. Braid-White was no fanatic proselytizer for ET; he appreciated the unequal temperaments as lovelyin givingdefinite character to each tonality, but pointed out that they died out becauseit does not allow for free modulation through all tonalities, and is hopelessly dissonant in at least half the chord formations common to modern music. Its true that ET has its own drawback -- there is no individual key coloring, so a piece of music will have the same character regardless of what key its played in but this was considered an acceptable tradeoff in exchange for having keyboard instruments sound equally (but slightly) out of tune (or in tune, once you get used to ET) in every key, and being able to modulate between keys. Note that most people alive today have heard only ET and do not find it dissonant, but in HTs the more distant keys with their wolf intervals were always considered dissonant, and people couldnt adjust to those dissonances and hear them as harmonious, as we have come to do with ET. To be continued References: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony by Ross Duffin, Copyright 2007. Tuning by Owen Jorgensen, copyright 1991. Piano Tuning and Allied Arts by William Braid-White, copyright 1917. Musical Temperament article on www.Wikipedia.org