My second complaint about Vallotti–and Young, by extension–comes from my position as an educator. It may seem unfair to criticize a temperament on the basis of complexity when the musical results achieved by professional musicians are often excellent. But so long as young musicians continue to be trained in ET, this will be a problem and we might as well face it: the notes in Vallotti are too hard to find. Hah! What a ridiculous assertion, you say. You tune it and then you play. Well, that may be true for keyboard players, who decide on a temperament that suits the music, spend a little time setting the temperament on the keyboard, then forget about it. It is in ensemble situations that I have a problem with Vallotti. From key to key, accidental to accidental, there are six different sizes of semitone in Vallotti and Young. Professionals who get used to performing with the same temperament all the time come to grips with this and eventually learn where to find the notes, but for student performers, it’s a frustrating situation, frequently aggravated by someone telling them how important it is to be performing in a “Baroque” temperament. It’s not just Vallotti and Young that share this problem, of course; any irregular temperament will have similar difficulties. But again, it’s Vallotti as the universal solution, chosen by harpsichordists who use it all the time for their solo playing, know how to tune it (and may not want to learn a new temperament), and unwittingly force the unsuspecting members of the ensemble–from sonata soloist to Baroque orchestra–to play it their way. It’s a clear case of the blind leading the blind. Keyboard players don’t see the problems of non–keyboard instruments performing in Vallotti, and the other instrumentalists and vocalists don’t know what the problem is–they just know it’s hard to be in tune.

Lastly, as heretical as it may sound, I would like to suggest that Vallotti and Young are not the best choices for Baroque music for musical reasons. Although recognized as an asset, “circulation” can be a liability as well. The liability of ET, as we have seen, is M3rds that are uniformly bad. In Vallotti and Young, there are three M3rds that are quite good, two that are mediocre, two that are as bad as ET, and five supposedly usable M3rds that are actually worse than ET! In the home key of C for Vallotti and G for Young, there are few problems, but venture very far from those centers and the consonances, though usable, are not very satisfying.

Is the flexibility of Vallotti and Young too much of a compromise for Baroque music? Is there some other historical temperament that, especially given a little more circumspection in the choice of keys for a given concert program, would produce a better result and be easier for an ensemble?