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 enlarge | Author: Ross W. Duffin
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.68
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New (29) Used (7) from $8.68
Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 117735
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0393334201
Dewey Decimal Number: 781
EAN: 9780393334203
ASIN: 0393334201
Publication Date: October 6, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-9 of 9 | | « PREV | | |
 Duffin is part of the problem with music today April 14, 2007
13 out of 58 found this review helpful
Author and music professor Ross W. Duffin whines in this book that equal temperant (the process of tuning a keyboard instrument, or a harp, for that matter, to a scale that is equally divided into 12 semitones) ruined music, as if no one in the last 300-400 years has wrestled with this problem. This kind of nonissue is a distraction from what is wrong with music today, but that's for another review. Duffin explains that while equal temperament may make fifths sound good, they make thirds and sixths sound too dissonant. Well, anybody who has ever worked with string instruments and vocalists is well aware of this issue--it is no surprise. It's not as if J.S. Bach were unaware of this issue 300 years ago, as he composed for voice, violin, and the keyboard--the man had to tune his own harpsichord by ear. After the complaint about thirds being out of tune, Duffin regresses into an explanation of the overtone series, the circle of fifths, and the history of temperament, but ultimately, is a new tuning system really going to make music any better today?
 How DID equal temperament ruin harmony? March 25, 2007
16 out of 19 found this review helpful
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.
 The Problem with Playing the Same Old Tuning March 16, 2007
24 out of 29 found this review helpful
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."
A Much-Needed Contribution November 21, 2006
29 out of 32 found this review helpful
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!
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