Stuart Isacoff hereby recounts this great battle over the best way to create music - a battle that culminated in the destruction of the harpsichord and the emergence, from its flames, of the piano.
For hundreds of years, musicians, craftsmen, church officials, heads of state and philosophers fought heatedly against the introduction of 'equal temperament' tuning. It is difficult now to imagine the keyboard as other than it is yet this was precisely what many European musicians practising before the nineteenth century demanded of their instruments. But this 'equal temperament' tuning was once a hugely controversial notion. Filled with original insights, fascinating anecdotes, and portraits of some of the greatest geniuses of all time, Temperament is that rare book that will delight the novice and expert alike.The piano is the best loved of musical instruments, thanks in part to the elegant symmetrical design of its ivory and ebony keyboard that ensures each pitch is reliably equidistant from the next. The contentious adoption of the modern tuning system known as equal temperament called into question beliefs that had lasted nearly two millenia–and also made possible the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, and all who followed. In this engaging and accessible account, Stuart Isacoff leads us through the battles over that scale, placing them in the context of quarrels in the worlds of art, philosophy, religion, politics and science. Indeed, from the time of the Ancient Greeks through the eras of Renaissance scientists and Enlightenment philosophers, the relationship between the notes of the musical scale was seen as a key to the very nature of the universe.
Few music lovers realize that the arrangement of notes on today’s pianos was once regarded as a crime against God and nature, or that such legendary thinkers as Pythagoras, Plato, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Rousseau played a role in the controversy.
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