[.ca] Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the ... (ISBN 0375703306)

From Amazon.com:
Involving mathematics, philosophy, aesthetics, religion, politics, and physics, Stuart Isacoff 's Temperament invokes the tone of a James Burke documentary. However, the focus is not on a modern invention, but rather a modern convention: that of tuning keyboards so that every key is equally in tune--and equally out of tune. With the existing literature tending to bog down in mathematical theory or historical tuning methods, Isacoff bravely attempts to make this seemingly arcane topic interesting to the general reader. He distills the mathematics and music theory into their simplest essences, and draws apt analogies from the everyday. He also generously peppers the text with the quirks and escapades of its more flamboyant central characters; the relevance of the information is often tenuous at best, but Isacoff has obviously done his homework, and he can be forgiven some frivolity. Less forgivable is his neglect of "well-temperament." Namesake of Bach's masterful collection of 24 pieces (one each in all the major and minor keys), the well-tempered keyboard liberated composers from the howl of badly tuned keys in the way equal temperament did, while preserving the distinct quality of each key. It was a pragmatic and aesthetically rich solution that captivated composers and theorists for decades. Yet Isacoff reserves less than two pages for its description. (Perhaps he deliberately overlooked the topic since it doesn't fit well with his casting of equal temperament's opponents as rigid, dogmatic, and impractical.) Despite its flaws, Temperament is an accessible guide to a fascinating topic seldom discussed outside musical circles. Though the book may not invigorate hard-core theorists, the amateur musician, armchair scientist, history buff, or plain old curious can glean plenty from it. The advent of digital keyboards--some of which can be tuned to historical temperaments at the flip of a switch--makes this an ideal time for the topic to be rejuvenated. --Todd Gehman

Why you might/might not like this book: Reviewing reviews:
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and, for the first time in my life, feel that I actually understand the issues around temperament. I would recommend this book to a lot of people but not everyone, as the number of negative reviews illustrates. The negative reviews for this book seem to fall into four categories-if you are in one of those groups then you may want to buy a different book: 1) The lunatic fringe: Examples here are: The review that castigates the book for abusing non-Western music (It's hard to see the point of this complaint since the intent of the book is to discuss the role of temperament in Western music--no real mention is made of any other kind of music); The review by the person who read only a 2 or 3 page excerpt of the book (apparently ignorance is no impediment to opinion); The person who hadn't read the book yet but would post a review when they had (see previous); The reviewer who felt that the book was all about sex (I missed that). And so on. 2) People who were unhappy about the lack of technical detail. While I am obviously disparaging the previous group, these reviewers have a valid complaint. These readers were looking for (as examples): actual scores; more math with more explicit discussion of the exact size of the differentials between similarly named tones; more technical terms (e.g. "hertz"). I have a good grounding in math, read a lot of technical material, but would probably best be described as a "music lover". I'm just not in these reviewers league. Since I don't read music, for instance, a score would be useless to me. For the audience that I represent, the level of technical detail worked very well and is appropriate for a "general interest" book. The author's description of the music met my needs and the prescence of a score wouldn't have helped. I didn't miss the technical details that these other readers were looking for. 3) Reviewers who felt a lot of the book was irrelevant and fluff. Also a valid comment as much of the book isn't directly about temperament (as an example, these reviewers would probably point to chapter 7, which is an overview of the birth of the Renaissance). However, the author's intent is not to discuss temperament but to discuss how the battles over temperament reflected much of what else was going on politically and culturally at the time. He wants to claim that the discussions of temperament reflected other battles and that the arguments over temperament were enabled only by other changes going on in the world. If that larger discussion doesn't interest you, this is the wrong book for you in the same way that the lack of technical detail made the book an unhappy experience for the previous group of readers. Again, I enjoy the kind of writing that tries to draw connections between relatively obscure technical matters and larger social interests. However, it does mean that this isn't a book that is just about temperament. 4) People who wished the author had gone into more detail/covered more topics. As examples: Apparently well-temperament has gotten short shrift (I can see that I would have liked more on the topic); The book focuses on the issues as demonstrated by tuning pianos (the author announces this early in the book); Some readers would have like more on temperament issues with other kinds of instruments; other readers wished the author had followed up on reference to temperament in China, organs, and other topics. Apparently there is room here for a larger book on this topic. I enjoyed the length of the book and it didn't leave me wanting more but that may just reveal my ignorance of the subject: Had I known more I may have wanted more. If you are looking for a medium-length discussion of temperament (a critical topic in understanding music) for the general reader and music lover, a book that tries to tie this topic into the larger cultural/political/social changes in the world--then this is a fascinating book. It's well written (a couple of stretched metaphors) and interesting (I devoured it in two days). If you are looking for a broader study, a more technical discussion, or a discussion of temperament purely in musical terms then you will be disappointed. I got excited about the topic! The book made me want to buy a CD that demonstrates the issues by playing the same piece of music in several different tunings--something that I wouldn't even have considered before.

A superficial glide:
This book is basically a rehash of Isacoff's major source, on which he relies too heavily: J Murray Barbour's 1951/72 "Tuning and Temperament". Barbour's own bias in his otherwise very well-researched book was the assumption that history is a mostly inexorable metamorphosis toward the current scientific triumph (really only a post-Industrial-Revolution conceit): equal temperament, against which all other systems must be measured and found deviant. Musicians didn't always have those same goals, as to quality of the sound they wanted. Barbour and Isacoff don't say that they did, and they dance carefully around it while offering a facade of musical objectivity. But, the historical SWEEP they present still gives that incorrect impression, overall, because of the way they measure value by their own expectations (the modern triumph over supposedly more ignorant methods) instead of the positive expectations of the people who composed tonal music. I found it remarkable that as early as page 6 Isacoff cites equal temperament as "the final solution"...a chillingly accurate assessment, as to the way it eliminates diversity from tonal music, the way somebody else's "final solution" eliminated human beings. Isacoff, to his credit, tries to present various sides of the historical issues; but the effort fails as he consistently errs on the side of embracing scientific triumph (as if equal temperament is the only scientifically plausible solution). He seems bewildered whenever presenting a scientist who never succumbed to the lure of the modern "final solution". More problematic, he tries too hard to sculpt personality profiles around all the major players in the historical record, and his observations degenerate into "ad hominem" dismissals of people he'd rather not have us believe. Isacoff also asserts piano supremacy over the harpsichord, as if the harpsichord is not worth much consideration anymore (and he even introduces the instrument with the unnecessary Beecham quote, biasing his readers against its virtues!); that's anathema to those of us who specialize in harpsichord! Isacoff's treatment of 17th and 18th century irregular systems (asymmetric tunings) is so curt and dismissive as to be almost non-existent; clearly, he doesn't understand them and would rather not deal with them, even though they have been continuously in use since at least the 17th century. His discussions of Do-Re-Mi present a related problem. While his frequent reliance on Do-Re-Mi is probably useful to some modern readers whose only exposure is the movie "The Sound of Music", it whizzes right by the historical teachings of hexachords and mutation (the way solfege really was taught). Most seriously, in all the historically valid irregular systems of keyboard temperament, those steps such as Do to Re, Re to Mi, or Fa to Sol are NOT the same size as one another, and that is an expressive advantage (having more than one size of whole step in the same scale...helping the listener's ability to recognize each tonality as distinct). Isacoff seems not to be aware of this. In his paradigm, that whole middle layer of circulating tunings between regular meantone and "the final solution" is wiped right out; never mind that our favorite composers wrote their best music in such systems, and that the subtle expressivity of that tonal music (the software) is heard to best advantage when the hardware is set up correctly. In short, overall, the human-interest angle of Isacoff here makes it look as if he simply wanted to do a Thomas Cahill spin-off, in a different field. His unscholarly sloppiness is not limited to the mining of Barbour. For example, the big point Isacoff tries to make about Willaert is lifted straight from the book "Lutes, Viols, and Temperaments" by Mark Lindley, but then twisted to Isacoff's own goals and explicated far beyond his own apparent understanding of ensemble singing. And, he really should have consulted Rita Steblin's reprinted dissertation, "A History of Key Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries", to see how musicians felt about tuning and the ways in which tonalities interact. Steblin supplies hundreds of historical records that are obviously outside Isacoff's apparent awareness. Anyway, Isacoff's book is entertaining, while dismayingly unscholarly: playing fast and loose with the evidence and not documenting any of his assertions other than listing a short bibliography (far too short for a book of this size, and a topic of this complexity). It's an attempt to boil down a complex field of mathematical and artistic science into a thrilling peep show; and that attempt devalues scholarship itself. His whole argument boils down to the observation that modern pianos are ubiquitous, and the related assumption that pianos now are in an optimal tuning for the music they play, that nothing better is or has ever been available. Well, that's where he's mistaken. A reader completely new to the topic of temperaments would be much better served by simply starting with Lindley's excellent article "Temperaments" in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and then exploring the sources found in that bibliography, with Steblin high on that priority list.

Sex and Pianos:
Isacoff's approach to making temperament interesting can be summed up in the word "sex". If there is a bawdy detail to be found in even the remotest connection to a 'temperamental' anecdote, he drags it out. The result is a book that often de-rails and mixes very technical information with hearsay and gossip. On the other hand, temperament is one of the most obscure and complicated elements of music, and even some musicians couldn't care less about it. So a book on temperament that made it to major bookstore chains is no small achievement. Still, the question of the book's audience is a complicated one... those of us who care about temperament to begin with could do with a few more musical examples interspersed with the text, whereas for those to whom temperament is a new concept, the idea of a smaller or larger fifth might need a bit more clarification. Most troubling to me, however, was the writer's obvious bias towards equal temperament and towards the piano. For him, the whole of western history (and a lot of sex...) has existed with the purpose of developing and embracing the equal temperament, and that pinnacle among instruments, the piano. To those of us who like the sound of a harpsichord, or use different temperaments to achieve more in-tune music, the book's conclusion, and it's author's bias, is unhelpful. Still I would recommend the book as a read, with the added stipulation that the reader then go out and listen to an early music concert in meantone.

Nice try, but no cigar.:
Isacoff has tried to write a book on musical temperament for the general public, and parts of it are fun to read. It does have two major flaws: 1) he greatly overstates his case and deliberately omits a whole lot of information that contradicts his central thesis, and 2), he bends over so far backward trying to keep things non-technical that he not only falls down but ties himself up in knots in the process. As a harpsichordist, I'm perhaps a little more flexible on the subject of an ideal temperament that is all things to all people, because my experience says there's no such thing. Of the various solutions that have been tried along the way, most of them served the needs of those who used them at the time. In fact, I was disappointed that his website sound samples included Chopin in just intonation and equal temperament, but no Byrd or Frescobaldi in meantone or Faenza Codex in Pythagorean, just to show us what all of those systems CAN do--especially on instruments other than the Steinway grand piano. Believe me, it's a revelation! On the other hand, when he writes about phenomena such as Cipriano da Rore's _Quidnam non ebrietas_, it would be much more helpful to include a score and a brief explanation of the rules of _musica ficta_ (which were what caused all the trouble in the first place). I happen to own other books which include these, but I shouldn't need to consult my personal music library to read a book that is "for general audiences!"

Interesting subject, unsatisfactory treatment:
The book is too anecdotal, an amateurish cultural history. Many of the materials are not quite relevant. If the author stuck to the subject the pages could be two-third less. Hope someone will come up with a better one.