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How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) | 
 enlarge | Author: Ross W. Duffin
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $17.13
You Save: $8.82 (34%)
New (6) Used (3) from $13.59
Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 320045
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 1
ISBN: 0393062279
Dewey Decimal Number: 784.1928
EAN: 9780393062274
ASIN: 0393062279
Publication Date: November 27, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks
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Product Description
A captivating look at how musical temperament evolved, and how we could (and perhaps should) be tuning differently today.
Ross W. Duffin presents an engaging and elegantly reasoned expose of musical temperament and its impact on the way in which we experience music. A historical narrative, a music theory lesson, and, above all, an impassioned letter to musicians and listeners everywhere, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony possesses the power to redefine the very nature of our interactions with music today.
For nearly a century, equal temperament—the practice of dividing an octave into twelve equally proportioned half-steps—has held a virtual monopoly on the way in which instruments are tuned and played. In his new book, Duffin explains how we came to rely exclusively on equal temperament by charting the fascinating evolution of tuning through the ages. Along the way, he challenges the widely held belief that equal temperament is a perfect, "naturally selected" musical system, and proposes a radical reevaluation of how we play and hear music. 48 illustrations.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
Fascinating, wondrous and finest kind December 16, 2008
This is an odd bit of book (only 160 pages) I picked up in Point Reyes Station a couple of years ago and only now got around to reading. First, it's gorgeous with wood-cut type illustrations. Second, there's too much physics involved for my taste (makes me feel ignorant and, of course, I am). Nevertheless, what an entirely different, fascinating and wondrous book. Keep in mind, this is targeted at muscians in a technical way regarding tuning but the writer is so fine he exceeds his bounds so finest kind.
 This book is a genuine goldmine for musicians July 30, 2008
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.
 Noble pursuit, but pointlessly obsessive. December 28, 2007
13 out of 21 found this review helpful
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.
Good overview of temperament November 13, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Very Good Book July 14, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
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