As a pianist of some ten years, I had for a while at the start no notion that other forms of tuning existed. The twelve notes I had at my disposal were all that seemed good, and anything else was "out of tune" (thus my early distaste for Eastern musics). Though I began having doubts during high school, it was not until college that my primitive understanding of tuning was blasted open. Webster University had one of the few Archifoons (Archiphone) in the world, and though it is not working, the fact that it could split the octave in smaller increments than the normal twelve tones was something I had never encountered. During my four years of college, different tunings were touched upon briefly, mostly in Music Theory IV and 20th Century Music History, but never dealt with in much detail (and certainly never put in practice). Thankfully, I recently finished an exceedingly intriguing introduction into the history of tuning systems, Stuart Isacoff's Temperament, its first edition published in 2003 (I read the paperback, which has a new Afterword that I will discuss later).
The subtitle makes clear the breadth of Isacoff's purpose: "How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization." People I would never have thought of having an interest actually had much to say on tuning, such as Newton and St. Augustine; the Chinese come into the picture; and even Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, once proposed to create a tuning of his own (he seems never to have gone past that pronouncement). The opening salvo was made by Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and seeming-prophet, who, according to legend, was so struck by the consonances and dissonances of hammer blows that he experimented and realized that notes forming the simplest ratios, such as 2:1, 3:2, and so on, were the most beautiful. Therefore, a system of tuning based on perfect fifths (Pythagorian tuning) arose. As with many great discoveries and creations, the flaws were as evident at the start as the strengths, and Pythagoras discovered that, once one returns to an octave of the opening note after the circle of fifths, this higher twin was impure, out of tune, and therefore a fatal flaw. In Pythagoras' time, this was of no concern, since music was monophonic and heavily reliant on speech patterns, so complexity of harmony was of no import. But this schism would arise roughly two millenia later, and embittered sides were taken. Among non-musicians, the matter was more theoretical and ideological than practical (though musicians did likewise, naturally). Though Pythagorean tuning was eventually removed from discussion, what replaced it was a debate of temperaments. Tempering involved slight changes to natural notes, and from this arose many different systems of altering what nature hath wrought. The three major temperaments were just-tone, mean-tone, and equal. Of the three, equal temperament (where all twelve notes are equidistant from each other) seems to have received the most vitriol, viewed by many as an affront against nature, and by others as practically impossible; it would take a Chinese man to first discover the mathematical way to bring this about. Isacoff's central concern is the contentious rise of equal temperament as the dominant system in Western Music, and whether music should be guided by nature and what should be, or man's perceptions and the practical. For me, the debate between Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo) and Gioseffo Zarlino is the most intriguing and thorough example of the problem, and Rameau's writings on music theory and tuning the most convincing final word (if there were to be such a thing in an ever-changing issue).
In his Afterword for the paperback edition, Isacoff deals with criticisms leveled against his book; most importantly, they show how strongly the debate still continues even today, with one critic even demanding the author rewrite his book "to reflect the evils of equal temperament." He also points out that, even though some works of some composers would work just as well, if not better, in well temperament, most were clearly conceived for equal temperament, and that the modern piano is inconceivable without its present tuning. Furthermore, he makes clear that the other temperaments have their own particular charm, and that equal temperament, though most practical, is not perfect. I think the same could be said of his writing: practical, even, and for a general public (in other words, engaging); but, as he himself admits, not perfect (he says that he could have spent more time on mean and well temperaments). Though a musician would find it of greatest value, Temperament is great for any student of Western thought, whether in fields such as philosophy, theology, or mathematics, and will carry any reader along as though it were the latest page-turner; however, this book should be secured an enduring position.
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