A fascinating and hugely original book that explains how a vexing technical puzzle was solved, making possible some of the most exquisite music ever written.
From the days of the ancient Greeks, the creation of music was thought to be governed by divine and immutable mathematical certainties. But over time skeptics came to understand that those rules limited harmonic possibilities. In Temperament, we see the traditionalists and the innovators battling across the centuries, engaging great thinkers like Newton, Kepler, and Descartes as well as musicians, craftsmen, church leaders, and heads of state. At the heart of their dispute is the question of how the tones of a musical scale should be selected.
The breakthrough came in the eighteenth century, when the modern keyboard was given perfect musical symmetry through a tuning of equal temperament, each pitch reliably equidistant from the ones that precede and follow it. This tuning allows a musical pattern begun on one note to be duplicated when starting on any other; it creates a musical universe in which the relationships between tones are reliably, uniformly consistent--a universe of greatly expanded possibility, one that allowed Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and all those who followed to compose the piano music we listen to today.
Stuart Isacoff relates the story of the reinvention of the piano--a story that encompasses social history, religion, philosophy, and science as well as musicology--in a concise and sparkling narrative. Temperament is a jewel of a book.
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: Long on stories short on practice. Comment: I have not read the book. Being deeply interested in the subject, friends who read it told me it is fun to read but it does not add to the state-of-art of the matter, especially for the musicians in search for advise. It is interesting how one can find nowadays lots of material on general matters about equal/unequal temperament and on mathematical trivia. However, detailed sound explanations about the underlying acoustics and practical advise for the tuner and performer of early music with ancient instruments is much thinner on the ground. Hopefully this can be improved upon.
Claudio Di Veroli
http://temper.braybaroque.ie/ Customer Rating: Summary: New view of old material Comment: Isaacoff delivers a fascinating and insightful view of something we might have considered too obscure to bother with. He tells the story of how modern western tuning evolved from the simple integer intervals that Pythagoras "discovered," to its current "irrational" intervals, and helps us understand, through entertaining and insightful anecdotes and historical analysis, how reflective the process was of our overall (European) cultural and artistic evolution. This is a great read for anyone interested in why we like or dislike the music that we hear, and how we got here. Customer Rating: Summary: Get the Newer Paperback Comment:
I make a practice of sending books I really enjoy to friends who have similar interests. Ordering up Temperament when it was first favorably reviewed in The Economist, and again as a gift, I saw there were some very negative reviews, which surprised me. Pleasantly, my gift book came in its newer paperback version which includes an Afterword where Isacoff addresses the critics complaints. The quite cranky complainants don't seem to "get it" that he, in this role, is an historian not an advocate of "equal temperament."
The history of slicing and dicing octaves into useful bites for the keyboards of organs, harpsichords and pianos has run 2,589 years from Pythagoras to Isacoff and is still running. 99% of pianos have twelve black and white keys and tuned to equal spacing, so twelve tones seems to be in the lead. Even Pythagoras who understood 3rd and 5th could not find a mix that would come out even. It is of course a compromise, but it is not correct to assume that Isacoff has a European bias for the twelve tone systems and is antagonistic to Chinese and Asian treatments of the issue.
This is a delightful read with the cultural and artistic histories of two millennia intertwined with the struggle for beautiful keyboard related music.
Robert Hansman Customer Rating: Summary: Listen to tempered instruments instead of reading about it Comment: I was quite impressed the first time I read Temperament. How Music became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization by Stuart Isacoff, which is the same book as Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest Riddle. I had a the time some theoretical knowledge about temperaments and effects on music playing but I didn't had any chance to experience it until recently.
A friend of mine showed me few months ago a recording called Six Degrees of Tonality. A Well Tempered Piano issued on Gasparo (GSCD-344). I liked so much what I heard that I ordered a second recording available on the same label and called Beethoven In The Temperaments. Historical Tunings on the Modern Concert Grand (GSCD-332). These recordings made by Ed. Foote (see review Not so fast, please., January 2, 2002)are a unique chance to experience other tunings than the widely spread equal temperament.
Returning recently to Isacoff's Temperament after reading L'Histoire de l'Acoustique Musicale by Serge Donval, I realised that the author just wanted to justify historically how and why ET is "THE" temperament that the world has been seeking for over thousand of years.
I invite readers of Temperament to listen to the four Piano Sonatas played on a Steinway D on Beethoven In The Temperaments (two tuned after Prinz and two after Young temperaments) and to compare with any other recordings performed on ET piano.
They will hear how Key Colors used to sound and how triads and chords sound so differently. Listening to the same works on a ET piano make it an uncomfortable experience even if the performer's name is Arrau, Serkin or Pollini.
My wish would be that Mr. Foote and Gasparo come up with more recordings of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt on a period tempered piano.
Customer Rating: Summary: Fascinating, Yet Flawed Comment: Temperament, by Stuart Isacoff, is almost a great book. It covers a little-known aspect of music history in great depth and with delightful insights and cute 'asides.' In short, it takes a technical subject that is over the heads of most readers and makes it accessible and interesting-- and in the process of course brings it down to a level that the average person can almost understand.
And there's where it fails.
Without audio examples to illustrate the points being made, most of the niceties of the different kinds of scale tuning throughout history are just so much description. Unless you've *heard* the type of tuning known as 'just tuning,' you really can have no idea how strange and sometimes beautiful and sometimes alarming the sounds can be, particularly the effects that familiar harmonies can have when tweaked away from our usual experience in this way. There is a website referred to in the book where you can go and listen to some of these things, but that's just not good enough. The book cries out for an audio CD to be included, with examples tied to specific points in the text, and vice versa. I'm sure the author would have been glad to do it. The publisher goofed.
The other problem in the book is that the author occasionally comes up with a 'fact' which is simply not the case. This is rare, but the fact that it happens at all is cause to wonder about the truth of some of the allegations that he makes. The book isn't scholarly [thank God] and there are no footnotes to use in checking the author's data, but I have a funny feeling that he has played a bit fast and loose with us on some points. No evidence-- just a feeling.
Still-- the book is well worth reading, particularly if you have enough musical background to be able to appreciate some of the author's stories and examples. The tales about politics, philosophy, and personalities gone awry would be fascinating even if the information about music weren't compelling-- which it is.
