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Well temperament (also good temperament, circular or circulating temperament) is a type of tempered tuning described in 20th-century music theory. The term is modeled on the German word ''wohltemperiert'' that appears in the title of J.S. Bach's famous composition, ''The Well-Tempered Clavier''. The phrase ''wohl temperiert'' first appeared in ''Musikalische Temperatur'' (1691) by Bach's predecessor Andreas Werckmeister (1645–1706), an organ tuner and music theorist. ==Origins== "Well tempered" means that the twelve notes per octave of the standard keyboard are tuned in such a way that it is possible to play music in most major or minor keys and it will not sound perceptibly out of tune. In most tuning systems used before 1700, one or more intervals on the twelve-note keyboard were so far from any pure interval that they were unusable in harmony and were called a "wolf". Until about 1650 the most common keyboard temperament was quarter-comma meantone, in which the fifths were narrowed to the extent that they were just usable, and would thereby produce justly tuned thirds. The syntonic comma was distributed between four intervals, with most of the comma accommodated in the sol to mi diminished sixth, which expands to nearly a minor sixth. It is this interval that is usually called the "wolf", because it is so far out of consonance. The term "mean tone", the basis for meantone temperament, refers to the mathematical averaging of thirds, in which the middle note (for example the D between C and E) is in the "mean" position between the notes making the third. Another example of this is equal temperament (which is actually eleventh-comma meantone if seen in the perspective as to how to divide the comma between the fifths). The wolf was not a problem if music was played in a small number of keys (or to be more precise, transposed modes) with few accidentals, but it prevented players from transposing and modulating freely. Some instrument-makers sought to remedy the problem by introducing more than twelve notes per octave, producing enharmonic keyboards which could provide, for example, a D and an E with different pitches so that the thirds B–D and E–G could both be euphonious. However, Werckmeister realised that these "subsemitonia", as he called them, were unnecessary, and even counterproductive in music with chromatic progressions and extensive modulations. He described a series of tunings where enharmonic notes had the same pitch: in other words, the same note was used as both (say) E and D, thereby "bringing the keyboard into the form of a circle". This refers to the fact that the notes or keys may be arranged in a circle of fifths and it is possible to modulate from one key to another unrestrictedly. Kenneth Robinson, attributes the invention of equal temperament to Zhu Zaiyu (Robinson 1980, vii) and provides textual quotations as evidence (Robinson and Needham 1962, 221). Fritz A. Kuttner is critical of his theory (Kuttner 1975, 163) and proposes that neither Zhu Zaiyu or Simon Stevin achieved equal temperament, and that neither of the two should be treated as inventors (Kuttner 1975, 200). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「well temperament」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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