Music theory has never been for the faint-hearted. This book, nevertheless, provides a deeply-felt and admirably lucid narrative which interweaves the complex mathematics and science of musical tuning with the cultural history of European civilization in a notably striking way, writes Harry White
Temperament attempts to recover the very phenomenon of vocal and instrumental tuning as a fundamental expression of the more broadly-based dialectic between authority and innovation which characterises so much of art and science history in the West. Although he begins and ends with the piano as the locus classicus of temperament and tuning, Isacoff works on a wide canvas. Perhaps it is too wide, given the sometimes bewildering roll call of musicians, theorists, scientists, politicians and philosophers enlisted in order to attest the centrality of music in the formation of Western thought, but the tense relationship between science, religious authority and musical expression that lies at the heart of Temperament is extremely well delineated.
In the first instance, this is a relationship determined by Pythagoras's discovery that musical concordances - the octave, the fifth and the fourth - could be expressed in terms of notably pure mathematical proportions: as Isacoff remarks, "only through the simplest kind of proportion does a pleasing harmony arise. Complexity breeds chaos". This is demonstrably true, even if the attraction of Greek music theory was its intimacy with mathematics, an intimacy which conferred upon the concords of medieval and Renaissance polyphony the status of natural order. Isacoff explains very well the building blocks of Western musical art not only in terms of their mathematical proportions but also in relation to the broader philosophical notion that a true musical discourse ought to be derived from nature herself.
Temperament traces the troubled history of this idea not only in relation to music itself (wherein the emergence of tonality sharpened the divide between philosophical notions of musical purity and the technical demands of accommodating a rapidly developing musical language within the confines of strictly proportionate tuning), but in relation to neighbouring art forms, notably painting and architecture. Sometimes the effort to relate political thought to musical theory appears rushed or naïve ("The age of science took its first small steps through the swinging pendulums, whirling planets and humming strings of Galilei, Stevin, Benedetti, and Kepler, and before long investigators everywhere were detailing God's hidden handiwork with triumphant satisfaction."). Nevertheless, Isacoff's panoptic vision of music theory as a vital expression of multiple conflicts in Western civilisation is fortified by his ability to link science, art, politics and technical detail in a narrative explicitly designed to foreground the prominence of music. Even if there is more than a hint of Will Durant in this process, the book is handsomely redeemed by "thick" (rather than "thin") readings of Pythagoras, Newton, Gioseffo Zarlino, Kepler, Vincenzo Galilei, Descartes and Rameau, to name only the principal protagonists in the battle for and against tempered tuning. The crowning achievement of Temperament, perhaps, is that it identifies an apparently self-contained musical problem - how to reconcile the division of the octave into twelve equidistant parts with the claims of proportion which, for all its natural and mathematical authority, renders music hopelessly out of tune with the cultural and political history from which this problem arises. The chapter on Galilei and his arch rival Zarlino ("The Alchemy of Sound") is especially successful in this regard, because it aligns the musical debate so skilfully with the underlying rift between church authority and the claims of humanism in sixteenth-century Italy.
There are some errors. In a book committed to historical musical narrative, it is strange to find Handel buying an organ in 1768, given that he died in 1757. Given the extensive disclosure of solmisation (the mnemonic syllables which Guido used to designate the scale), we should read resonare fibris and not resonare floris. And any musician who is comfortable with do-re-mi might pause at the description of the first four notes of Beethoven's fifth symphony as "mi-mi-mi-do". The most privileged and compelling music student I ever met tried the same thing in an examination, but even she didn't get away with it.
Harry White is Professor of Music at University College Dublin. His book The History of a Baroque Oratorio will be published in 2003
Temperament. How Music became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilisation. By Stuart Isacoff. Faber and Faber. 259pp. £12.99 sterling