HOW EQUAL TEMPERAMENT RUINED HARMONY This instant

This isn't the first book I've read on tuning and temperment and I'm not sure how I'd react if it were.

I got the feeling Duffin was really fired up to rebut Stuart Isacoff's "Temperment" published awhile back that asserted the Temperment Wars were largely settled by Rameau's time. Isacoff, in addition to being a writer is a pianist, which may make him suspect in Duffin's view.

Fair enough and Duffin's prose is much more pleasant to read than Isacoff's, but beneath the surface, "How Equal Temperment Ruined Harmony" is often circumstantially argued, stuffed to the gills with filler bios (I don't care that Duffin acknowledges the Oxford Dictionary - they deserve co-authorship if not co-royalty for taking up so many pages). And the cartoons are by and large awful and unneccessary. They make the typical Dummies cartoons look like the New Yorker by comparison.

Beyond this Duffin is no doubt a knowledgable and passionate advocate for his view.

He's not asking musicians to abandon "ET" (good luck with that), but instead asking them to broaden their range of intonation possibilities and understand why and when a varied approach to melodic and harmonic adjustment may yield surprising and satisfying results. In asking us to be open and experiment the book serves a purpose. When Duffin implies "try it and you'll never go back", he comes across as somewhat less than open-minded.

I had a general problem with Duffin's tone, which frequently condescends. He seems at times to assert that no one other than himself is in on this long-lost secret wisdom. It might just surprise him to discover that many non-classical musicians are just as sensitive to and deal with intonation issues - even some of us hopelessly mal-intonated players of fretted instruments.

Duffin raises historical questions that are valid, interesting and worth contemplating by all musicians. Unfortunately, many of them can never be definitively answered. Did the tuning system begat the music or did the evolution of musical practice toward greater chromaticism gradually shape the systems? Did the massive popularity of the piano in the nineteeth century as the symbol of middle class culture unduly "mis-condition" generations of naive music lovers into blanket acceptance of the artificial equal termperment? With the overwhelming majority of (western) music possessing both melody and some form of harmony, is Duffin's purist approach really feasible for all but the solo performer?

All interesting ideas worth considering and a good read (and fairly quick if you skip the boring bios).
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