Stuart Isacoff - Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization

Admirable. Isacoff writes engagingly [about] a time when there existed a glorious synthesis of music and mathematics, and in the imaginations of scientists and philosophers and musicians it wove the entire universe into a grand design.

The New Republic

Charming. As much a whirlwind tour of Western cultures big ideas as it is a musicological investigation.

Los Angeles Times

The pleasure here is that it gives readers a glimpse of the oceanic depths of musical metaphors and mysteries still unsolved by cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.

The Wilson Quarterly

A sweeping history of medieval and Renaissance European intellectual achievement, in which the question of tuning assumes a speaking part. Temperament should appeal not only to music lovers but also to fans of cultural and scientific history.

Time Out New York

An astounding and accessible journey through the culture-defining narrative hidden in arcane music theory. Isacoff does a wondrous job.

The Onion

This lucid, humanist study is as much fun to read as a murder mystery.

San Jose Mercury News

[Brings] together aspects of science, philosophy, history, poetry, religion, and music in a compact yet compelling narrative.

Library Journal

A superb example of how to present a dauntingly complex subject in an engaging manner. Isacoff weaves his combination of history and theory with a vibrant narrative drawing on other aspects of human achievement. Apart from being a delightful read, [it] explains the underlying basis for the pianos dominant role in music since the development of temperament.

Pittsburgh Tribune

If the world finds itself in need of a twenty-first-century equivalent of Sir Donald Francis Tovey, I nominate Isacoff for the job.

The American Record Guide

An entertaining romp through music history.

The Telegraph (London)

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 countrys 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.

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2003

Copyright 2001, 2003 by Stuart Isacoff

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Harvard University Press: Excerpt from a Confucian ode, interpreted by Ezra Pound, from Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius by Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), copyright 1954 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.

Selden Rodman: The Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Selden Rodman, from 100 Modern Poems, edited by Selden Rodman (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949). Reprinted by permission of Selden Rodman.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Isacoff, Stuart.
Temperament : the idea that solved musics greatest riddle /
Stuart Isacoff.
p. cm.
1. Musical temperament. 2. Musical intervals and scales.
3. MusicPhilosophy and aesthetics.
I. Title.
ML 3809.183 2001
784.1928dc21 2001033805

eISBN: 978-0-307-56051-3

Author photograph David Beyda

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To the lights of my life,
Adrienne, Nora, and Rachel

Stuart Isacoff provides examples of the music and tunings he describes in Temperaments Online Audio Companion located at www.vintagebooks.com.

Prelude

Ay me! what warbles yields mine instrument!
The basses shriek as though they were amiss!

William Percy, Coelia (1594)

T he piano is perhaps the most generous instrument ever invented. Its range, from bass to treble, is as large as an orchestras. It allows ten tonessometimes even moreto be struck simultaneously, and holds them in the air at a pianists 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 pianos 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 ones eye has become accustomed to the terrain, the alternating groupings signal the names of each note on the keyboard. There are only twelve different tones (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; Debussys 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 symmetryeach 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 Galileos 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-y, 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 Denisan advisor to Father Marin Mersenne, philosopher Ren Descartess most trusted authority on science and mathrejected todays approach as quite wretched. Deniss