There is a large Scandinavian community in Seattle, and I know a couple of people who play the nyckelharpa. There are also a number of people around who play the hammered dulcimer. No Cajun accordions that I'm aware of, but lots of diatonic harmonicas and a couple of chromatic ones.

NONE of them are concerned with pure intonation, and there are a few self-taught folks who wouldn't know what you're talking about. It does not affect their ability to play and enjoy some very listenable music.

Jack, the point of this thread, as Josepp outlined it in the opening post, is to provide people who are a bit "iffy" on matters of which chords go with which keys--i.e., relative beginners or those without formal training—with an easy way of working it out. In his next-to-last paragraph he made it quite plain that dickering over "quarter-tones" was not to be part of the discussion.

I've done a great deal of teaching. And I know that one of the things that can really screw up a relative beginning student is to lumber them with a bunch of unnecessary historical minutiae before they fully understand the basics.

Let's not try to confuse the issue, okay?

Don Firth

P. S. I doubt very seriously that anyone, even with fairly acute hearing, is going to even notice a discrepancy of 38/10,000s of a cycle per second.

You're familiar with the fairy tale about "The Princess and the Pea?" The young woman was so refined and sensitive that she could feel a pea through a whole stack of twenty mattresses. The fact that she was so sensitive was proof that she was a genuine princess.

Can you imaging living with someone who is that sensitive?