Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest Riddle

A fascinating and hugely original book that explains how a vexing technical puzzle was solved, making possible some of the most exquisite music ever written.

From the days of the ancient Greeks, the creation of music was thought to be governed by divine and immutable mathematical certainties. But over time skeptics came to understand that those rules limited harmonic possibilities. In Temperament, we see the traditionalists and the innovators battling across the centuries, engaging great thinkers like Newton, Kepler, and Descartes as well as musicians, craftsmen, church leaders, and heads of state. At the heart of their dispute is the question of how the tones of a musical scale should be selected.

The breakthrough came in the eighteenth century, when the modern keyboard was given perfect musical symmetry through a tuning of equal temperament, each pitch reliably equidistant from the ones that precede and follow it. This tuning allows a musical pattern begun on one note to be duplicated when starting on any other; it creates a musical universe in which the relationships between tones are reliably, uniformly consistent--a universe of greatly expanded possibility, one that allowed Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, and all those who followed to compose the piano music we listen to today.

Stuart Isacoff relates the story of the reinvention of the piano--a story that encompasses social history, religion, philosophy, and science as well as musicology--in a concise and sparkling narrative. Temperament is a jewel of a book.

Stuart Isacoff is a pianist, composer and writer, and the founding editor of the magazine Piano Today. A winner of the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music, he is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and many music periodicals. Mr. Isacoff is a featured lecturer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where his series is entitled “The Language Of Music.” He has given lectures and piano performances at many venues here and abroad, including The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, The Verbier Festival and Academy, The Gina Bachauer Foundation, The Miami Piano Festival, The Portland Piano Festival, The Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the Juilliard School, Sarah Lawrence, Cal Arts, and Harvard University, and at such scientific institutions and conferences as the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Bradbury Science Museum, the Sarzana (Italy) Festival of Mind and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His work in interdisciplinary studies has also brought him to such venues as the Vero Beach Museum of Art, where he lectured on links between kinetic art and music.

Mr. Isacoff teaches a graduate course in the philosophy of music and an undergraduate survey in the history of Western music at the Purchase College Conservatory of Music (SUNY), and a course in the art of writing at St. John’s University. He has also taught musical improvisation at William Paterson University and at festivals around the world. His written works include jazz-influenced compositions and instructional materials, published by Boosey & Hawkes, G. Schirmer, Warner Bros. Publications, Carl Fischer, and Ekay Music, Inc. His piano recitals often combine classical repertoire with jazz improvisation, demonstrating the threads that connect musical works created centuries and continents apart.