Customer Reviews

Tuning and Temperament: A Historical Survey (Da Capo Press music reprint series)

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This book is a standard source on scales and temeraments, and their history. It compares and contrasts Pythagorean tuning, just intonation, meantone, irregular temperaments, and finally equal temperament. Barbour displays a strong predisposition towards twelve tone equal temperament in this work, and interprets the history of scales and temperaments as an inexorable march towards equal temperament.

If you are a publishing company looking for something to reprint, this is a classic.

Barbour's book is essential reading for anyone wanting a comprehensive overview of historical temperaments, from the early Greeks to the twentieth century. That said, Barbour wrote from the vantage point of someone firmly believing that equal temperament is the ultimate expression of temperament, so the reader is left to interpret the contents, absorb what's good and toss out what's not so useful. Barbour cites many sources, so the book makes a decent bibliogrphy for further study. In fact, having read the book the reader should indeed go to the sources and make his own interpretation of the sources.
This book can be a tough read for someone not mathematically inclined - the analysis of every temperament is mathematically-based, and little reference is given to the needs of musicians. Additionally, a great deal of the book's ink is devoted to theoretical temperaments that either are not useable or have never found a use, so the reader is inclined to skip pages unless purely theoretical temperaments are of interest.
While this book is essential reading, there are several other contemporary writers on tuning and temperaments. Highly recommended is Mark Lindley's entry on the subject in the New Grove's. For a valuable polemic on temperaments and harmony, read Ross Duffin's recent "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)", available at Amazon.com.

A very tough, academic book. Not a gentle introduction to the subject at all. This would not be good as a first book on the subject, but maybe a second or third.