In music theory, Young temperament is one of the circulating temperaments described by Thomas Young in a letter dated July 9, 1799, to the Royal Society of London. The letter was read at the Society's meeting of January 16, 1800, and included in its Philosophical Transactions for that year.[1] The temperaments are referred to individually as Young's first temperament and Young's second temperament,[2] more briefly as Young's No. 1 and Young's No. 2,[3] or with some other variations of these expressions.
Young argued that there were good reasons for choosing a temperament to make "the harmony most perfect in those keys which are the most frequently used", and presented his first temperament as a way of achieving this. He gave his second temperament as a method of "very simply" producing "nearly the same effect".
- ^ Young (1800). The material on temperaments appears on pages 143-47. The paper was reprinted in Nicholson's Journal in 1802 (Young, 1802), along with a list of errata (p.167), and a corrected version appeared in volume II of a collection of Young's works published in 1807 (Young, 1807, pp.531-554). The original paper had contained an error in the placement of the first temperament's E♭ on a monochord (Barbour, 2004, p.168).
- ^ Barbour (2004, pp.180, 181).
- ^ Barbour (2004, p.183).