Customer Reviews

Tuning the historical temperaments by ear: A manual of eighty-nine methods for tuning fifty-one scales on the harpsichord, piano, and other keyboard instruments

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This book is totally amazing i got it to study up on some of the more popular historical temperaments before i started to tune them and expirement with them on some pieces i am playing and it astounded me on several occasions. His explanations are clear and easy to understand and the history he provides is very pertinent and valuable. If any of you out there have this book and are looking to sell I'd like another copy so send me an email at Ira_parrot@yahoo.com

I saw this book few times, I like the flowing on each character of ear training. But this is a old book, so it was not easy to fund.

Owen Jorgenson performed a great service in authoring seveal texts on the subject of historical temperaments. These books have made the subject approachable for many people, and enabled many to attempt tuning harpsichords and fortepianos on their own. In Tuning The Historical Temperaments by Ear, however, he leads the reader astray with an erroneous interpretation of how to tune quarter comma mean tone. His first error was to use Pietro Aaron, a sixteenth century mathematician, as his source. Aaron did write a complete and accurate mathematical description of quarter comma mean tone, but not an actual recipe on how to set the bearing for the temperament. A methematical description does a tuner little good, and Jorgenson proves the point by instructing the reader to tune QCMT by tuning a string of perfect thirds. This is a recipe for disaster, as tuning by thirds is difficult if not impossible because the third interval can sound perfect when it actually is not. The first cogent and complete description of how to tune quarter comma mean tone was written about 1650 by Jean Denis, a treatise in which Denis instructs the reader to set narrow but acceptable fifths, and use the thirds (which should be "good", as in not necessarily perfect) as checks to determine if the fifths are correct and the temperament any good. This tuning pattern, of tuning a circle of fifths, and checking with thirds and sixths, was to be used for setting all mean tone temperaments, up to and including 11th comma mean tone, otherwise known as equal temperament.

There are some other errors, such as identifying Werkmeister III as an equal-beating temperament, but the first betrays a surprising lack of depth in his scholarship.

I have a doctorate in piano performance and am so glad that while pursuing that degree I was privileged to learn to tune using this book as a reference. I took 2 years of piano technology and the piano technician at UMKC at that time (Mr. Paul Wolf) was a former student of Owen Jorgensen's. Mr. Wolf made sure we learned to tune beginning with the greek scales and moved forward to modern equal temperament. This perhaps has been the single most influential factor in my career. Mr. Wolf was an excellent teacher and I was also privileged to meet Mr. Jorgensen. For anyone who plays professionally, learning about the piano and how to tune it is critical. I keep my Steinway A tuned to a Victorian temperament. Thanks to this book I can easily do that (I do tune the artistic way...by ear beginning with a C tuning fork, as suggested by Mr. Jorgensen). The music world owes Mr. Jorgensen a huge debt of gratitude for writing this book and his later one that was published in I believe 1990. The sad part is that the books are out of print now. I personally owe Mr. Paul Wolf a debt of gratitude for taking me on as a student and for doing such a great job of teaching me music history, performance and theory as related to the historical temperaments.

Dr. Robin R