FW: New book

Hey all!

Here is a new book on tuning. Describes the 'evolution'
of tuning through primitive, practically unsuable
scales like the ancients used to the morue modern and
sophisticated solution to the problems of the world...
12tET.

Shows how 12tET "Solved Music's Greatest Riddle" and
how the development of 12tET made "possible some of the
most exquisite music ever written".

Surely we all agree, no?

[I'll resist the well-nigh irresistable temptation I
have right now to comment on the various claims made by
this book, leaving that fun to others for now.]

Here's some more quotes I found intriguing from
*reviews* (why I found them intriguing should be
obvious):

"Bach's 'Well-Tempered Clavier,' surely the most
eloquent and staggeringly ingenious endorsement of
equal temperament"

"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."

"[12tET] 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."

"This book should be required reading for all musicians
and those who wish to gain a more profound
understanding of *why* *great* music is forever."

Anyway, it's clear from this book that we are all on
the wrong path and should immediately abandon these
wrong tunings we are using when the law of evolution
has given us 12tET -- the only tuning POSSIBLE for
truly GREAT music.

- J

*******************

Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest
Riddle

by Stuart M. Isacoff

ISBN: 0375403558

Subtitle: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest Riddle

Author: Isacoff, Stuart M.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright: 2001

Subject: Music, Musical intervals and scales, Theory,
History & Criticism, Musical Instruments - Piano,
Musical temperament.

Edition Number: 1st

Edition Description: Includes bibliographical
references and index.

Publication Date: November 13, 2001

Binding: Trade Cloth

Language: English

Illustrations: Y

Pages: 288

Dimensions: 7.82 x 5.35

From the Barnes and Noble Website

From Our Editors The Barnes & Noble Review There is an
aspect of music that most listeners take for granted:
scales and how they are tuned. It seems simple; we can
all sing or at least recognize a major scale. But
through a survey touching upon seminal moments in the
evolution of music, Stuart Isacoff shows exactly how we
came up with the collection of notes that is
fundamental to everything we know as Western music --
from Beethoven to the Beatles. The basic story
progresses from the ancient Greeks' mathematically
devised system of tuning to what we know today: the
series of white and black keys on the piano. What we
find is that musical possibilities themselves have
radically changed over time, depending on how our
instruments have been tuned.

In addition to explaining the basics of Western tuning,
Isacoff leads us on fascinating excursions through
ideas and events that have governed cultural values
from the Middle Ages to the present, showing how these
things have shaped what has been considered beautiful,
possible, or even heretical in music, as well as in
painting, architecture, mathematics, physics, and
theology. Through these explorations, Isacoff creates a
context in which the story of Western tuning can be
understood in relation to the central intellectual and
ideological currents running throughout the history of
the West.

Temperament does require a very basic understanding of
music (if you can pick out a scale on a keyboard,
you'll be fine). That said, Isacoff's explanation of
what "tuning" is and how it developed is engaging and
remarkably clear. (Jason Royal)

From the Publisher:

A book that explains how a vexing
technical puzzle was solved, making possible some of
the most exquisite music ever written.

From the Critics:

From Charles Rosen:

A stimulating, illuminating and entertaining look at a
fascinating musical subject.

From Andre Watts:

A work of real virtuosity. An exciting musical tour
through Western Civilization that reads like a
thriller, filled with intrigue, discovery, jealousy,
failure and triumph. It's a fabulous exploration of the
forces that influenced the wonderful music we hear
today.

From Library Journal:

Isacoff, a composer and editor of Piano Today magazine,
illuminates issues surrounding the different modes of
musical temperament, bringing together aspects of
science, philosophy, history, poetry, religion, and
music in a compact yet compelling narrative. He
addresses the development of equal temperament in
chapters ranging from the ancient Greek origins of
Western tuning through discoveries by 16th- and
17th-century astronomers and physicists to today's
composers and performers. His fascinating side paths on
how the Roman Catholic Church dealt with scientific
progress, the genesis of various musical instruments,
his sojourns in China, and the clashes between major
players such as Galileo and Zarlino add flashes of
drama. The writing is geared to those with little
background in music, but Isacoff's arguments can also
be appreciated by informed readers. A distracting use
of sentence fragments is one of the only drawbacks to
this impressive effort. The up-to-date bibliography
includes classics in the field and new research.
Isacoff's book is a worthy complement to Owen
Jorgensen's massive treatise Tuning (Michigan State
Univ., 1991) and is recommended for all libraries.
(Index not seen.) Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs.,
Oxford, OH Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Pianist and composer Isacoff delves into "equal
temperament," the 18th-century tuning system that
carved the octave into 12 equal intervals. When a
Renaissance musician tuned a musical instrument
according to the dictates of the Church-approved
ancient Greeks, it could be played only in certain keys
and was limited to intervals of the octave, fifth, and
fourth. This was not a problem until keyboard
instruments came into prominence and composers made
increasing use of the third and sixth intervals.
Unpleasant sonorities resulted from the old tuning, and
compositions were rendered unplayable. Kepler, Newton,
and Rousseau were among the period's leading thinkers
who took part in the search for a better tuning system.
Many elaborate and convoluted solutions were proposed,
but equal temperament was the least elegant and most
pragmatic, dividing the 12 tones within the octave into
12 equal intervals. Flying as it did in the face of
tradition, this solution unsurprisingly drew fierce
opposition, but it ultimately prevailed. Painting a
vast backdrop for his arcane subject, Isacoff often
strays too far afield. He devotes page after page to
other admittedly fascinating intellectual issues, from
perspective to planetary motion, and although he writes
well and lovingly about almost all of them, it's
jarring when he realizes he must return to the matter
at hand and thus wrenches the narrative back to the
more mundane topic of temperament. And he betrays an
anachronistically secular view when he describes early
harmonic compositions as the result of "bored monks in
search of amusement" without providing any evidence of
this alleged boredom. Most difficult to fathom is
Isacoff's mere passing reference to Bach's
"Well-Tempered Clavier," surely the most eloquent and
staggeringly ingenious endorsement of equal temperament
and surely worthy of a few more lines of commentary.
Well-meaning but disappointing: a history in search of
a subject. (45 b&w illustrations)

FROM THE BOOK

Table of Contents

1 Prelude 3
2 Newton's Desires 9
3 In the Realm of the Gods 26
4 So Many Bells 43
5 The Search for La: A Musical Puzzle 58
6 Frozen Music 69
7 The Harmony of Heaven and Earth 81
8 A Keyboard Perspective 94
9 Euclid's Gift 107
10 The Alchemy of Sound 132
11 A Short Trip to China 158
12 The Scientists Confer 171
13 Liberty, Equality, Adversity 198
14 Coda 226
Acknowledgments 235
Bibliography 237
Index 251

From the Powells.com website

More About this Book

Publisher Comments:

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.

Review:

"Isacoff delves deeply into Western and Eastern
philosophy and religion to describe the breakthroughs
each developmental period made toward resolving the
dissonances inherent in perfect tunings. A fast-paced,
excellent historical exposition for every music lover."
-- Booklist

Review:

"A work of real virtuosity. An exciting musical tour
through Western Civilization that reads like a
thriller, filled with intrigue, discovery, jealousy,
failure and triumph. It's a fabulous exploration of the
forces that influenced the wonderful music we hear
today." -- Andre Watts

Review:

"Unfortunately, [Isacoff] sometimes clumsily attempts
to keep his audience's attention with irrelevant, if
salacious, gossip e.g., philosopher Robert Hooke
'recorded his orgasms in a diary,' and King Louis XIV
refused to eat with a fork. Meanwhile, he gives
relatively short shrift to Kepler and Galileo. His
ambitious historical canvas uses extensive secondary
sources, but there are research gaps, such as his
outdated portrait of Isaac Newton as a total 'ascetic.'
Nevertheless, this harmonics drama will excite music
geeks and music historians." -- Publishers Weekly

Review:

"A stimulating, illuminating, and entertaining look at
a fascinating musical subject." -- Charles Rosen

Review:

"Painting a vast backdrop for his arcane subject,
Isacoff often strays too far afield. He devotes page
after page to other admittedly fascinating intellectual
issues, from perspective to planetary motion, and
although he writes well and lovingly about almost all
of them, it's jarring when he realizes he must return
to the matter at hand and thus wrenches the narrative
back to the more mundane topic of temperament. And he
betrays an anachronistically secular view when he
describes early harmonic compositions as the result of
'bored monks in search of amusement' without providing
any evidence of this alleged boredom. Most difficult to
fathom is Isacoff's mere passing referenceto Bach's
'Well-Tempered Clavier,' surely the most eloquent and
staggeringly ingenious endorsement of equal temperament
and surely worthy of a few more lines of commentary.
Well-meaning but disappointing: a history in search of
a subject." -- Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"An absorbing, meticulous, deeply thoughtful
exploration of the principles behind the magnificent
machine - the piano - that has become the central
instrument in Western music." -- Tim Page

Review:

"This book should be required reading for all musicians
and those who wish to gain a more profound
understanding of why great music is forever." -- Van
Cliburn

About the Author:

Stuart Isacoff, a recipient of the ASCAP Deems Taylor
Award for excellence in writing about music, is a
pianist, lecturer, composer, and the creator and
editor-in-chief of the country's largest-circulation
classical piano magazine, Piano Today. He has
contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of American
Music and has written for the New York Times. He lives
in Bergen County, New Jersey.

Excerpt:

Chapter 1

Ay me! what warbles yields mine instrument!
The basses shriek as though they were amiss!
- William Percy, "Coelia" (1594)

The piano is perhaps the most generous instrument ever
invented. Its range, from bass to treble, is as large
as an orchestra's. It allows ten tones-sometimes even
more-to be struck simultaneously, and holds them in the
air at a pianist's will. The piano can growl and sing
and beat time. It can render arid fugues and
impressionist waterfalls with equal naturalness. And,
unlike the ungrateful French horn or the finicky oboe,
if you keep it in tune, it will be an obedient servant.
But the principle that truly underlies the piano's
versatility is hidden beneath the geometry of its white
and black keys.

Clusters of two blacks, then three, then two, and so
on, form a repeating pattern above a solid row of
whites. When one's eye has become accustomed to the
terrain, the alternating groupings signal the names of
each note on the keyboard. There are only twelve
different ones (each tied to a letter of the alphabet),
and in our modern tuning they are built in equidistant
steps, like a well-made ladder.

This arrangement produces wondrous results: Through it,
a Chopin prelude can gently weep across the keys;
Debussy's perfumed phrases can swirl in gentle clouds;
Webern can set in motion intricate strings of melody,
like threads of glistening pearls.

All of this is possible only because the modern
keyboard is a design in perfect symmetry-each pitch is
reliably, unequivocally 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 musical tones are
reliably, uniformly consistent. Playing a piano for
which this was not true would be like playing a game of
chess in which the rules changed from moment to moment.

Yet, that is precisely what many European musicians
practicing before the nineteenth century demanded of
their instruments. In fact, for hundreds of years,
suggestions that our modern system be used were taken
as a call to battle: Musicians, craftsmen, church
officials, heads of state, and philosophers fought
heatedly against the introduction of this
equal-temperament tuning as something both unnatural
and ugly. When Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei,
supported it as an ideal as early as 1581, he promptly
became embroiled in a feud with Gioseffo Zarlino, one
of the most influential music theorists of the day.
(Sensing a good thing, Chu Tsai-yü, a prince of the
Ming dynasty, soon after attributed the concept to the
work of Huai Nan Tzu in 122 b.c.e.)

The seventeenth-century instrument-maker Jean Denis-an
advisor to Father Marin Mersenne, philosopher René
Descartes's most trusted authority on science and
math-rejected today's approach as "quite wretched."
Denis's Treatise on Harpsichord Tuning was published in
1643, the year that a pupil of Galileo's, Evangelista
Torricelli, conducted world-shaking experiments in
atmospheric pressure, overturning essential elements of
medieval cosmology. Though radical changes in worldview
were erupting all around him, Denis remained
steadfastly loyal to an old tuning system in which the
musical distances between notes were determinedly
inconsistent, forming a minefield of "wolf sounds" on
his keyboard-notes so dissonant they reminded listeners
of the howling of wolves.

Harpsichords and organs (precursors of the piano) thus
tuned were capable of producing harmonies of magical,
uncorrupted sweetness in one moment and-as musicians
attempted to duplicate them while navigating the spans
of their keyboards-of earsplitting clashes the next.
Composers were prisoners of these torturous
practicalities, as were vocalists and instrumentalists
who tried to join in. Yet the resistance to a remedy
that we find perfectly acceptable today-the tuning of
equal temperament-was so powerful, the idea was for
generations almost unspeakable.

The crux of the problem can be traced to the ancient
Greeks, who defined music's most beautiful sounds as
arising from inviolable mathematical relationships-the
fingerprints of the gods. These were the proportions
through which two separate tones could entwine to form
a delightful union. Centuries after Pythagoras
conceived of the notion, the great astronomer and music
theorist Johannes Kepler restated the idea eloquently:
"Geometry existed before the creation, is coeternal
with the mind of God, is God himself. . . ." Musical
harmony was that geometry made sensual, and was not to
be toyed with. And yet . . .

As the art of music evolved, a startling paradox arose
that threatened to undermine the entire arrangement.
When harpsichords or organs were tuned so that they
could consistently produce sounds corresponding to one
of the venerable formulas, they were rendered incapable
of playing the others. No instrument with fixed,
unbending notes such as a piano can accommodate them
all. Thus, certain combinations of tones that should
have sounded sweet and placid could, on an early
keyboard instrument, become sour and ragged. In search
of a solution, musicians began to temper, or alter,
their instrument's tunings away from the ancient
ideals. The final solution-today's equal
temperament-abandoned most of the revered musical
proportions altogether.

Acceptance did not come easily. Critics claimed the
resulting music had been robbed of its beauty and
emotional impact; supporters countered that since all
things are subjective, human ears and minds would learn
to adapt. The arguments, however, went well beyond
musical aesthetics. Equal temperament represented an
assault on an idea that had gripped thinkers in nearly
every field as a powerful metaphor for a universe ruled
by mathematical law.

Saint Augustine found in music's magical proportions
God's revealed plan for the building of his churches.
Renaissance philosophers sought in them the secrets of
obtaining life from the heavens; composers yearned for
the power they had bestowed on ancient musicians to
tame wild beasts, seduce the celestial spirits, even
lure trees to the surface from beneath the sheltering
earth. Kepler found in music's time-honored proportions
the rules governing the motion of planets in the sky.
And Isaac Newton matched the relationships these
proportions established between pitches in a musical
scale to the arrangement of colors formed by sunlight
passing through a prism.

Music's prized proportions permeated not only the inner
sanctums of the church, but the workshops of great
artists like Filippo Brunelleschi and Leonardo da
Vinci. They became entangled in the world of scientific
inquiry-engaging the imaginations of such luminaries as
Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and Christiaan
Huygens. They fed debates between the French
encyclopedists, challenging the rhetorical skills of
Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean d'Alembert,
and Jean-Philippe Rameau on questions such as "What is
'art'?" "What is 'truth'?" and "What is 'natural'?"

They spurred strange musical inventions from remarkable
figures like the sixteenth-century avant-garde composer
Nicola Vicentino, Mersenne, and Juan Caramuel y
Lobkowitz, a Spanish mathematician, professor of
theology, and military engineer at the court of
Ferdinand III in Prague. And they instigated the
creation of countless tuning systems in an incessant
negotiation between the old ways and the forces of
change. Along the way, they pointed up the conceits and
follies of generations of theologians, musicians,
philosophers, and scholars who insisted that the
proportions in the mind of God must fit in the mind of
man.

The general acceptance of equal temperament led to some
of the most exquisite music ever written. Why the
resistance to it lasted so long, and how it was
gradually overcome, is a story that encompasses the
most crucial elements of Western culture-social
history, religion, philosophy, art, science, economics,
and musical evolution-during a period when Europe was
struggling to give birth to the modern age. This book
tells that story.

It is a tale that includes "temperament" in all its
diverse meanings: from the elements that shape the
temperament, or character, of pivotal thinkers; to
endless efforts to temper-or transform-the material
world into something more desirable; to the practice of
tempering, or altering, the purest, most beautiful
harmonies, following the startling revelation that in
certain situations they must be reshaped or they will
transform music, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like, into something
grotesque.

This last definition, though arcane sounding, marks a
profound moment in cultural history. Temperaments,
settling like tracks along the winding path of Western
civilization, unfettered the engine of musical
progress. Once freed, and fueled by the sparks of those
most human of qualities-imagination and passion-musical
art, with religion, politics, and science in tow,
chugged its way inescapably toward our own era.