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How Equal Tem­pera­ment Ruined Har­mony (and Why You Should Care) Ross W. Duf­fin
W. W. Nor­ton 2006World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder

In his pre­lude, Duf­fin men­tions a recent book about the his­tory of equal tem­pera­ment. The book to which he refers is Stu­art Isacoff’s Tem­pera­ment (reviewed here), although Duf­fin only iden­ti­fies it in his end­notes. He takes issue with Isacoff’s treat­ment of the sub­ject, say­ing that Isacoff “con­cluded that Rameau dis­cov­ered equal tem­pera­ment (ET) in 1737, and basi­cally we all lived hap­pily ever after.” Duf­fin sees this as more or less the party line amongst present-day musi­cians; he relates an anec­dote about the con­duc­tor Christoph von Dohnányi as an exam­ple of this.

As one might guess from the book’s title, Duf­fin does not agree with the view of equal tem­pera­ment as the be-all and end-all, the Holy Grail of tun­ing sys­tems. He crit­i­cizes authors like Isacoff and Mur­ray Bar­bour (whose 1951 book Tun­ing and Tem­pera­ment is the stan­dard schol­arly study of the issue) for approach­ing the his­tory of tun­ing with an extreme bias towards equal tem­pera­ment. Duf­fin asks how Bar­bour, who admit­ted that he had never heard any­thing other than equal tem­pera­ment, could pos­si­bly dis­miss all other tun­ing sys­tems as infe­rior and unusable.

Thus, Duf­fin sets out to write a bal­anced his­tory of tun­ing sys­tems, one that does not take the supremacy of equal tem­pera­ment as a given. In doing this, he goes beyond the stan­dard his­tor­i­cal writ­ings. He exam­ines instru­men­tal meth­ods, the writ­ings of lesser-known musi­cians, and even musi­cal pas­sages (such as in the cello part of Haydn’s String Quar­tet op. 77, no. 2, where the com­poser spec­i­fies at one point that an E-flat and an adja­cent D-sharp should be played as the same note, indi­cat­ing that he prob­a­bly didn’t expect this else­where). Duf­fin also delves into more recent his­tory, exam­in­ing the prac­tices of nineteenth-century piano tuners and ana­lyz­ing early sound record­ings made by promi­nent artists such as vio­lin­ist Joseph Joachim.

Duf­fin brings all these dis­parate sources together to argue not only that the cur­rent pre­dom­i­nance of equal tem­pera­ment devel­oped later and more spo­rad­i­cally than is gen­er­ally accepted, but also that prior to about 1917, so-called “equal” tem­pera­ments were often not so equal at all.

Duf­fin writes con­vinc­ingly on his topic, and does so with pas­sion and a sharp wit. His intended audi­ence is more schol­arly — or at least more musi­cally trained — than that of Stu­art Isacoff, but his prose is still delight­fully read­able. There are quite a few side­bars through­out the books, mostly devoted to short biogra­phies of per­sons men­tioned in the text. It’s nice not to have to refer to Grove or Baker’s to get some back­ground infor­ma­tion on some of the more obscure per­son­ages, but these side­bars often inter­rupt the text in awk­ward places. There are also a hand­ful of car­toons scat­tered through the text. These sort of set the tone of the book, but even the best are only smirk– or groan-worthy. I’d rec­om­mend that any­one with more than a pass­ing inter­est in the sub­ject of tem­pera­ment read both Isacoff’s and Duffin’s books in order to get two very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives on the matter.