I've recommended to the author that he consider making smart phone apps that can help folks hear the subtleties he describes, about beat, about variance in temperament, and about chord versus progression of melody.
I'm hoping to see more from this author in print and in the digital world. This book provides a rather technical and historical overview of Equal Temperament. It's very interesting and valuable, but not so much for the non-musician or the uninitiated.
Amongst other things it made me understand that indeed there is a difference between an augmented second and a minor third, and between a G and an Ab. If G and Ab mean nothing to you, this book is definitely not intended for you. Louis Headley.
I devoured this book in one day. Duffin makes his case with precision and sensitivity, providing source material and references throughout. I was also impressed that he's not afraid to offer opinions of those who disagree with him.
I don't think I'll quite use a non equal tuning system for my piano, but if I ever own two I'll now consider it. The only thing I find fault with is the extremely low quality publication. The cover doesn't line up with the pages and the formatting within the book is sometimes done in a strange way with footnotes going over multiple pages and some text boxes occupying a strange space. But I can hardly fault the author for that.
It was a mind-bending struggle for long stretches to grasp - or attempt to grasp - the physics at core of the author's commentary on the history of western tuning systems and how we got to ET equal temperament for not only fixed-pitch instruments like the keyboard family, but an extended agreement out to ALL modern instruments. However, I feel the challenge was definitely worth it.
As an amateur musician foraying into Baroque music performance, I believe I'm now a little better prepared for those moments of tuning chords across voices in an ensemble, knowing that there's a history of disagreement on what the objective should be. I'll still end-up bending to the keyboard, as that poor instrument is incapable of adjusting to the harmonics of the moment, but I now know why I have to indulge it for the sake of the whole. Secretly, however, I'll take comfort in the book's closing admonition taken from Pablo Casals: "Do not be afraid to be out of tune with the piano.
It is the piano that is out of tune. The piano with its tempered scale is a compromise in intonation. But the musical scale that you take for granted? There's a lot more to it than you might expect. Notes are frequencies of vibration; certain ratios of vibrations work well together. Other basic ratios work well: that is, they sound especially pleasing to our ear when played together. A ratio of is called a perfect 4th, and is the relationship between a C and an F; a ratio of is called a perfect 5th, and is the relationship between a C and a G.
That's a great start, but to make a song you'll need more notes than that. Conveniently, if you split an octave starting with C into twelve even intervals, you'll end up with a good number of notes, and two of those notes will almost exactly correspond to that F and G. Great: we have a full set of notes, those notes allow us to play the pleasing 4th and 5th, and the regular relationship lets us transpose music in a simple, flexible, powerful manner to any key.
Well, not quite. They're close, but they're not perfect. Ultimately, we have to make a choice: do we want to maintain the ability to play exact harmony with perfect 4ths and 5ths, or do we want a scale that is flexible, not fixed to a single scale, and works pretty well? That decision -- how to adjust the scale to handle those cases -- is temperament. Musicians and composers throughout history have made different choices, and there are good arguments for either way.
In recent times, though, virtually everything only uses equal temperament equal intervals between notes , to the point where trained musicians, people who have played for years and decades, don't realize that there is another choice. Some aspects of this are simply fascinating. This book does a decent job of covering them.
Unfortunately, it spend the vast majority of its space describing the history of how different musicians and composers have chosen different temperaments, and not all that much space covering the music theory that's necessary for really understanding temperament. I absolutely enjoyed the first few chapters, where Duffin describes the basic problem and gets into a little theory. However, he doesn't really go deep enough. The history of scales and temperaments is somewhat interesting, but it becomes overwhelming: one composer felt one method was better, a different composer preferred another type, and so on.
In the end, the beginning chapters were great, but they only began to whet my appetite; the majority of the book was not nearly as interesting. Someone that is more interested in the history for history's sake would definitely appreciate this book more much than I did. Duffin's thesis is pretty straightforward: 1 equal temperament is not the best temperament in all occasions, as compared to its many alternatives, and 2 it was known long ago long before its almost universal adoption as a standard and still dismissed by most musicians for a long time because of its impure tunings.
The issue of musical temperament is old and unsolved. ET came as a practical and reproducible solution to the issue, and by it was assumed essentially as a standard.
To the point that the physics of acoustics is only taught in advanced musical courses, the difference between major and minor semitones has no real value, and above all hardly anyone has ever listened to music played in a different temperament, so it has simply become a second nature to us.
It is just like we have eaten pizza since we are born but never knew about its original neapolitan taste. Many might say, ok the difference between just intonation and ET is so small that the latter's convenience for keyboards and fixed tuning instruments is more than legitimate. Duffin claims that today we are beyond this simplistic matter, and it's time to use temperaments as close to nature as possible wherever possible.
Duffin reconstructs the history of the matter, the many proposal of solutions, the opinions of many distinguished musicians about temperament, the philosophical underpinning of the acceptance of ET interestingly connected to the rise of positivism, if not communism and particularly the late disposal of precise measurement tools that finally allowed the temperament to be precise. A rather academic book perhaps, but definitely interesting and provocative for what matters, thin and well documented.
Pythagoras is still concerned about the issue. Duffin's proposal of using notes as close as possible to natural acoustics makes sense, given the constrainst on horizontal and vertical musical dimensions. I was very happy to read this book as I've never liked equal temperament except for music post-Debussy that is non-tonal.
It's great to discover that J. Bach's famous Well-Tempered Clavier was written for a "well-tempered" and not an "equal-tempered" keyboard.
The possibility of discovering different character for the different musical keys is tantalizing, rather than being stuck with same-old boring grey equal temperament. I would have liked a little more discussion beyond Western music. At the end of the book he begins a discussion of monodic music, and, in a footnote reveals that a year old scientific study showed that listeners — both musically-trained and not — preferred the "expressive intonation" of raised major thirds and leading tones.
Since Persian music, for example, has a quite sharp major third, the whole topic of whether there is an acoustical reason for the separate western harmonic traditions and the monodic traditions of the Silk Road would be fascinating to explore — in another book of course.
I recommend this book for any musician and enthusiast that would like to understand more about the hegemony of the way music sounds today and consider why great tunes are increasingly a rare breed these days. David Dines. If the full text can be characterized by the first half, it's a fairly breakneck tour through the modern history of the adoption of equal temperament tuning.
Coming into it I was aware that there were different tunings outside of ET, but I had no real idea what benefits over it they provided. Duffin, I think, does a good job of picking out clear, or at least less than murky, quotes from historical texts to illustrate his point, but I find the most value from the illustrative musical examples he discusses as they provide the best evidence for the practical reasons for using any tuning over another.
If you progress in a cycle of pure fifths where the notes have a ratio of , as imagined, say, by the length of the strings plucked from a starting note of C, when you next end up at a C, you end up a quarter of a semitone too high.
This might not seem too disastrous, but it doesn't sound good - "an excruciating discrepancy", as Professor Duffin puts it. He knows that he is dealing with what may superficially look like an abstruse subject. And, looked at one way, it is: for the past years or so, musicians have been nudged towards the orthodoxy of Equal Temperament ET , until its almost complete ubiquity in the 20th century.
Most audiences of the western canon and this means pretty much everything we hear in Britain apart from some of the more far-flung world music on Radio 3 are hearing notes played from a scale where everything has been flattened ever so slightly in order to even out the differences. So it is, in a sense, a non-problem - in the way that the elephant, safely ignored in the corner of the living room, is also a non-problem. But look at the fingerboard diagram from Peter Prelleur's The Modern Musick-Master and you will notice that C sharp comes before D flat; and E sharp is pitched higher than F flat.
This kind of layout, common in contemporary academic textbooks, favors those of the World Wide Web generation who are not used to following the linear flow of a narrative, but tend to "browse" various "links" as they study. Though Duffin writes with a light style, the text is still very scholarly with meticulous documentation. The overall structure is chronological, basically following the history of Western music. The book reads like a good mystery novel; finding out what kind of tuning systems were actually used by well-know figures in music history makes this book a real "page turner.
Starting from a low note, seven pure octaves should equal twelve pure fifths, but they are actually off by about a semitone, making some kind of temperament, or adjustment in tuning, necessary. This became especially true as keyboard instruments began to be widely used.
Various temperament systems were tried in early music, some of them regular, spreading the adjustment evenly, and some irregular, favoring certain pitches and keys at the expense of others. In equal temperament ET , twelve Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. By using alternative tuning methods, each sharp or flat is distinctive. Equal temperament was designed so a keyboard instrument could play in every key without being retuned, but opponents argue that convenience is gained at the expense of subtle coloring and variation.
Duffin maintains that even after equal temperament was invented, composers and professional musicians still chose to use alternative methods—therefore, he says, performance in equal temperament creates a different sound than the composer originally intended. Duffin's history of tuning includes sidebars that explain concepts and brief biographies of some of the musicians and theorists he cites.
Illustrations and reproductions of musical scores help shed light on complexities—and several hand-drawn cartoons poking fun at some of the author's ideas add a touch of humor. A comprehensive plea for more variety in tuning methods, interesting but mostly inaccessible to the non-professional.
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