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| How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony: And Why You Should Care | 
 enlarge | List Price: £9.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 1 reviews)
Sales Rank: 3697
Category: Book
Author: Rw Duffin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
Studio: W. W. Norton & Co.
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Co.
Label: W. W. Norton & Co.
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0393334201
Dewey Decimal Number: 781
EAN: 9780393334203
ASIN: 0393334201
Publication Date: October 31, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Engaging, entertaining and robust, a fascinating view of music February 5, 2007
32 out of 32 found this review helpful
Never judge a book by its cover, they say, and it must be even more true that you should never judge a book by its title. As soon as I saw the title of this book, however, I knew I would have to make an exception in this case and read it.
Ross Duffin has written an engaging, densely argued and robust demolition of the commonly held idea that equal temperament triumphed in the time of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier and has been the one true tuning ever since. Drawing his evidence from documentary, instrumental and, for the 20th Century, recorded performances, Mr Duffin shows that the equal temperament (of 12 equally-spaced semitones to the octave) only became any form of standard much later than generally imagined, and is in many cases still more honoured in the breach than the observance - indeed the Well Tempered Clavier itself was Well Tempered, not Equal Tempered.
As to his subtitle (`And Why You Should Care') he argues that we are hearing the majority of music in a very different way than was intended by the composer - Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, to name but three, wrote their masterpieces to be performed in temperaments other than the equal, thus fundamentally altering the way in which the very chordal progressions, and therefore the overall timbre and character within the pieces, progress.
Along the way Mr Duffin gives entertaining pen portraits of the major figures in his story, has a wealth of anecdotal asides, and writes in a generally entertaining and accessible way.
I say `generally' because there is no possible way of avoiding the mathematics, subtleties and jargon of tuning and temperament; this is a musicological work, and its readership will probably be unjustly restricted by virtue of some of the more technical sections. While being critical I would also like to have seen the aforementioned pen portraits grouped at the end of the book or at the end of chapters; the small page format of the book means that the main flow of the text is disrupted by the interjection of the portraits at the precise point in which the person or concept is first introduced. I would also have liked to have known whether Mr Duffin thought the spread of recorded music in the 20th Century affected the standardisation of tuning systems, and perhaps also seen his argument and examples straying outside the purely classical repertoire into such areas as blues and folk.
Those minor quibbles aside I would heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of music, the development of musical instruments, and to anyone who, like me and also the cello student quoted in the text, wondered why the great expressive cellist Pablo Casals sounded so `out of tune' on first hearing.
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