How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) [Paperback]

Ross W. Duffin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2008

"A fascinating and genuinely accessible guide....Educating, enjoyable, and delightfully unscary."—Classical Music

What if Bach and Mozart heard richer, more dramatic chords than we hear in music today? What sonorities and moods have we lost in playing music in "equal temperament"—the equal division of the octave into twelve notes that has become our standard tuning method? Thanks to How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, "we may soon be able to hear for ourselves what Beethoven really meant when he called B minor 'black'" (Wall Street Journal).

In this "comprehensive plea for more variety in tuning methods" (Kirkus Reviews), Ross W. Duffin presents "a serious and well-argued case" (Goldberg Magazine) that "should make any contemporary musician think differently about tuning" (Saturday Guardian). 48 illustrations

Editorial Reviews

Review

A delightfully informative and provocative argument that we should rethink our common musical habits at the most basic level. -- Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Ross W. Duffin, the Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of the award-winning Shakespeare's Songbook. He lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393334201
• ISBN-13: 978-0393334203
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,442 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #92 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > History & Criticism

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Problem with Playing the Same Old Tuning, March 16, 2007

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (Hardcover)

Piano players in some ways have it easier than other musicians. For instance, a pianist, if called upon to play a perfect A, presses a button on the instrument, and out comes a perfect A (if the piano tuner has done his job right). Violinists, slide trombonists, and even singers run the risk of sliding around and being too low or too high. But I was surprised to find that there is controversy in such things as how a piano ought to be tuned, or how scales are to be divided. I am not a musician, but in _How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)_ (Norton), Ross W. Duffin asserts that even classically trained musicians are not aware that there is more than one way to divide scales, and he also asserts that the current predominant system, Equal Temperament (ET), is not necessarily the best for all purposes. "It's all wrapped up in recent evolutions in musical performance and teaching, the result of decades of delusion, convenience, ignorance, conditioning, and oblivion." Musicians are going to get much more out of this book than I did; Duffin says, "It's for everyone who performs or cares about music," but many of the technical aspects of his argument were often above the head of this "carer". Nonetheless, this is an important book to give, again, the vital lesson that much of what we take for granted, much of what we consider fundamental, is only the result of the past's convenient compromises.

The difficulty with dividing up the scale is one of physics and aesthetics. Scales divided into octaves don't quite contain perfectly the fifths (Duffin explains all this) and one solution is to narrow (in musical terms, to "temper") each of the twelve fifths by one twelfth of the missing fit. That is an equal temperament (ET). Even Duffin agrees that equal temperament is an elegant solution to the problem, but like all solutions to complicated problems, it has disadvantages, especially that it makes major thirds dissonant. Musicians originally were not ready to tolerate such harsh major thirds, and so irregular (non-equal) temperaments were preferentially used until the nineteenth century, and Duffin makes the case that even into the twentieth century equal temperament was not the enforced standard it has come to be. In the twentieth century, however, there were many social forces to make temperaments equal. The piano became a central piece of furniture for homes of all classes, and the piano (and to a lesser extent, the organ) became the main instrument that other instruments had to play around. With music instruction becoming more popular, makers of those other instruments found it simpler to make them based on the basic equal temperament system.

Duffin writes that equal temperament has been so thoroughly adopted "... that most musicians today are not even aware that any other systems exist, or that if they exist, that they have any musical worth whatsoever." The biggest drawback in such ignorance is that pre-equal-temperament compositions, of course, have to be fitted onto equal temperament instruments and playing. The enthusiasm for historically accurate performances, even with historic instruments, can never be fully successful without accepting that the composers and players of the time were using historic temperaments rather than the current monolith. "I'm not saying that harmonic intonation should replace ET entirely and substitute its own tyranny," says Duffin, "only that ET is not necessarily the best temperament for every single musical situation encountered by today's musicians." Duffin's book is scattered with sidebar pages to introduce concepts like temperament itself or pure intervals, and also to give accessible capsule biographies of musicians, composers, and music theorists who have taken part in the history of temperaments. One of the musicians so profiled is the cellist Pablo Casals, with whose words Duffin gleefully winds up a mind-stretching work: "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."

46 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How DID equal temperament ruin harmony?, March 24, 2007

By 

William A. McNair "Music lover" (Columbia, SC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (Hardcover)

Ross Duffin's book is good. He gives an excellent history of the various temperaments used in Western music until the 20th century when one temperament -- Equal Temperament -- became the standard. I was surprised, however, that he never really answered the question posed in the title -- how did ET ruin harmony? He does a pretty good job of describing what sounds different about certain intervals -- thirds and fifths in particular -- but he never really discusses harmonic progressions and how temperament affects how they sound. He also discusses how unequal temperaments cause one key to sound different from another and how composers were sensitive to these differences. But again, no real discussion of why erasing these differences with equal temperament 'ruined' harmony.

The great challenge here is writing about something that really must be heard. I frankly agree with Duffin that unequal temperament makes music from the 17th - 19th centuries more interesting to hear. I was hoping he would find words to describe why.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Timely Book, May 21, 2009

By 

M. De Sapio (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (Paperback)

In this book, musicologist Ross Duffin examines an acute but little-known problem in classical music today: a great many professional musicians do not know how to play in tune. The problem has its roots in the mid 19th century, when the equal temperament system of tuning keyboard instruments (in which the purity of all intervals other than the octave is compromised in order to accommodate modulation) gained currency, eventually becoming the standard tuning system. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, musicians such as Sarasate and Casals started advocating "expressive intonation", in which the upward or downward pull of various notes in the scale was exaggerated (yielding overly sharp leading tones and flats that are too flat). "Expressive intonation" turned out to be a poison: after a while, it became an ingrained habit, and musicians no longer remembered what the notes and chords were supposed to sound like in tune. The problem was exacerbated by the 20th-century innovation of continuous vibrato on string instruments (which tends to muddy intonation) and the fact that intonational subtleties eventually stopped being widely taught. It wasn't until the early music movement of the late 20th century that musicians revived old tuning systems and rediscovered their beauty. A majority of conventionally trained musicians, on the other hand, are still mired in the past: they do not know what a pure third sounds like, or are unaware that there are tuning systems besides equal temperament. It is ironic that back in the 1970's, the "early music" pioneers were accused of producing performances that were amateurish and out-of-tune; in reality, they were the only musicians who knew how to play IN tune (though the difficulty of period instruments sometimes proved an obstacle to putting this knowledge into practice).

Duffin's thesis is that equal temperament ruined harmony, but I would suggest that it had a detrimental effect on melody as well. Who can deny that chromatic passages in Bach or Mozart sound infinitely more interesting in an unequal temperament, in which the size of the half steps varies? Not to mention that equal temperament flattens out the distinction between consonance and dissonance when all intervals are slightly out of tune. Duffin missed the opportunity to explore these points more extensively. Another "minus" for me were the sidebars with biographical blurbs of various figures in the history of temperament (these were pointless and distracting), and the silly cartoons which were out of place in a serious book about music. But whatever the book's flaws might be, the importance of its message is undeniable: to awaken mainstream musicians to the subtleties of tuning.