Customer Reviews

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

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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."

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.

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.

This is a clear and entertaining explanation of one of the most crucially important (and resolutely ignored) problems in the contemporary performance of historical music: TUNING. The issues are clearly laid out, and the mathematical material deftly presented in a way that even innumerate readers such as myself can understand. This concise book is a great help to me, and is quite accessible to the nonspecialist reader. VERY highly recommended!

This book has a very clear message. Tune your violin to Extended 1/6 Syntonic Comma Meantone and play with different flats and sharps. Your music will dramatically improve.

The tuning is not complicated, the application is simple and most of all it works extremely well.

I applied it to an Irish jig that always sounded wrong in either Equal Temperament or Pythagorean tuning and immediately the problem was solved. Reading the book explains why in detail.

The book is written in plain English and is very unassuming and unpretentious. It intelligently isolates and makes obvious the important issues from an otherwise overwhelmingly complex subject.

The historical information in the book provides a rich context to present the message and makes the reading so interesting that you don't want to put the book down.

No one who plays a stringed instrument should miss this book. For everyone else it is simply wonderfully educational.

Warning! The following "disclaimer" appears at various points of the Kindle edition of the book:

"Images in this book are not displayed owing to permissive issues."

(This Review applies to the digital (Kindle) edition of this book, as of August 2011.)

Indeed, no diagrams, drawings or other images, often referred to in the text, almost all which would be necessary for a proper comprehension of the subject, are included in the digital edition.

This is a highly disturbing matter for the readers of the digital books. I wish the publisher will take the steps to make amends, as soon as possible, the least of which would be updating the file by including the missing images, and sending an update to those who have already bought the "image-missing edition", at no additional cost.

In any case, this is a practice which should be strongly discouraged by the growing population of eBook readers. Amazon is advised to remind publishers to make such differences emphatically clear in their Book Descriptions, and if at all possible, avoid altogether discriminating against the eBook audience by producing such unnecessary discrepancies between the digital versus the printed copies of the same work.

As for the text, it's well-informed and lively, with a penchant to explain a complex issue such as intonation in a most plain and comprehensible language. The subject is further brought to life by the author's subtle sense of humor. It's an enjoyable read, for anyone interested in the subject, even as one could reasonably take issues with some of the positions taken by the author against the widely adopted Equal-Temperament, or his quick dismissal of another author's position on this (Stuart Isacoff) early in the book. Overall, it's a nice addition to the ongoing debates on intonation, good enough to help me ignore the missing images and give it a 4 star for the content. (Meanwhile, I've considered to order a paperback copy of the book, as well.)

© 2011, Payman Akhlaghi, August 26th, 2011, Los Angeles

Ross Duffin is engaged in quite a noble pursuit - the fact that equal temperament holds such a monopoly over the business of harmony, even in today's day and age, is nothing short of a travesty. Duffin's intention is to persuade readers and fellow musicians alike to reinstate the use of alternate tuning systems such as extended meantone and Just Intonation. Although that intention is more than commendable, the execution of it leaves much to be desired, as the argument posited by this book exhibits some major problems.

Perhaps Duffin's biggest misstep when composing his argument was his stubborn desire to rewrite the history books on tuning and temperament. In the text, he goes to great lengths to highlight specific instances in the past when composers and performers favored something other than equal temperament, whether they knew they were doing so or not. He even devotes large sections to biographical information on some of these less-than-famous musicians, surely in an attempt to garner some acclaim for them in their work outside of equal temperament. All of this amounts to not much more than Duffin being able to stake the claim at the end of his book that equal temperament became widely accepted only around 1850 (not 1800 as others have asserted), and it didn't fully dominate Western harmony until 1917, when pianos became standardized. Apparently this means he has won some large battle against his contemporaries who claim that equal temperament is a "perfect" tuning system and has been in favor since the time of Bach. While this may be revolutionary information for Duffin's musicologist and historian readers, speaking as a musician who hoped to find information in this book that might illuminate the importance and practice of harmony using pure intervals, I found much of Duffin's argument to be nothing but trivial jargon.

In addition to clouding his ultimate goal by devoting pages and pages of evidence toward the demonstration of his irrelevant point on the dominance of equal temperament, another major misstep of Duffin's is this: The body of this book is composed of 159 pages; Duffin FIRST introduces and explains the concept of cent values on page 115. The "cent" value, or an increment equivalent to one twelve-hundredth of an octave, is by far the most precise increment to use when describing the value of any given interval; yet for the first 114 pages of this text, Duffin is content to ramble on about the classical notion of "commas" - small microtones in between a semitone - as well as the various ways to divide an octave and derive from it different temperaments, all without a single mention of cent values. He does this in order to adhere to the chronological nature of his thesis, but for anyone embarking upon a serious discussion of harmonic increment values which is meant to persuade partially through education, I consider this a major flaw.

Finally, and perhaps the most frustrating downfall of this book for me, is that there is nary a snippet or blurb devoted to the plethora of twentieth century composers and performers who DID rail against equal temperament by incorporating alternate tunings into their compositions. Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Harry Partch, Glenn Branca, Ben Johnston - these are only a handful of composers who have employed either Just Intonation or some other system of tuning based on microtones, in either many or all of their works. Perhaps Duffin overlooks these artists because they are primarily based in the avant-garde? Even if that is the case, I find it to be no excuse. After all, anyone willing to act out Duffin's suggestions and undertake the use of pure intervals in their music, would almost have to be inherently defined as avant-garde, since such a pursuit is so thoroughly against the grain.

All in all, Duffin raises some interesting points, and you will probably learn a thing or two by sifting through the material in this book, however, there are much better ways to become convinced that pure intervals are superior to equally-tempered ones. "Shri Camel," by Terry Riley, or "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer," by La Monte Young, are two fantastic recordings you can purchase which employ Just Intonation. Perhaps an even better way to convert yourself is to DO it yourself. Many mid- to high-end electronic keyboards on the market today can be retuned according to cent values, and thus, can be adjusted to play in almost any tuning system. The simple reality is that different systems of tuning do certain things better than others, and any serious musician should work to incorporate the best tuning system for whatever artistic notion they may be trying to convey. Just Intonation is far superior, harmonically, to equal temperament, but it is also very difficult to get accustomed to. If you are curious about it, I advise you to ditch Duffin's book and refer to Village Voice contributor and noted composer Kyle Gann's website on microtones and Just Intonation for everything you need to get started in your new approach to harmony.

Good luck.

If you have not read much about temperament, this book has a good historic overview with clear explanations of the mathematics of this musical predicament. It is a fascinating subject (if you like that sort of thing) and the author has, as the title suggests, a point of view on this. Did equal temperament ruin harmony, I don't think so, but it is certainly worth considering other tuning systems and "bending" equal temperament to suit a particular musical situation.

This book is not only informative about musical temperment and the effect that our present equal temperment has on harmony, it is also well written and funny at times.

A great buy for anyone interested in music history/theory.

This is a wonderful book, but get the physical copy.

In the Kindle edition, the graphs and images, all of which are essential to understanding the material, are excised due to copyright issues. Without them, the book is useless.

Amazon was kind enough to refund, btw.

Too bad the simplistic star rating system doesn't allow me to rate the book vs the edition.