Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest Riddle

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Reprint. Later printing, 2002. Hardcover. Very good in very good dust jacket. Signed by author. DJ has slight wear and soiling.. [10], 259, [3] p. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. 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., "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 soci l history, religion, philosophy, and science as well as musicology--in a concise and sparkling narrative. Temperament is a jewel of a book." From the author's website: "Stuart Isacoff is active across North America and Europe as a writer, pianist, composer and lecturer. His ongoing presence in the cultural landscape has included presentations at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Lincoln Center, as well as at festivals around the world; regular contributions on music and art to The Wall Street Journal; and classes at the Purchase College Conservatory of Music (SUNY). Mr. Isacoff is the author of A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians From Mozart to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between (Knopf), and of the highly acclaimed Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (Knopf/Vintage). He is a winner of the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. Stuart Isacoff has given lectures and piano performances both here and abroad, at such venues as The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Verbier Festival and Academy (Switzerland), Music@Menlo, the Portland Piano Festival, the Miami Piano Festival, the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, the September Music Festival (Torino), the Gina Bachauer Foundation, the Van Cliburn Piano Institute and others, as well as at such scientific institutions as the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Bradbury Science Museum and the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics. His compositions, arrangements, editions, and instructional texts have been published by G. Schirmer, Boosey & Hawkes (London), Carl Fischer, Music Sales Corp., Warner Bros. Music, and Ekay Music, Inc. He was the founding editor of the magazine Piano Today, a position he held for nearly three decades. Stuart Isacoff's piano recitals combine classical repertoire with jazz improvisation, demonstrating the threads that connect musical works created centuries and continents apart. Of his playing, pianist André Watts has said: "Stuart Isacoff's music-making is original and revelatory. Subtle, brilliant use of the instrument combined with a unique musical perspective, create performances of uncommon depth. Isacoff reveals his beautiful interior world with every performance."