[CAUT] ET vs UET

[Fred Sturm]

On Apr 23, 2010, at 7:42 AM, Laurence Libin wrote:

> Duffin's book was the antidote to Stuart Isacoff's silly  
> "Temperament: The Idea that Solved Music's Greatest Riddle" (2001).  
> Both are popular treatments, not scholarly.


	Yes, although Duffin is actually a professor of music and heads early  
music at the Cleveland Institute, so he has less excuse for not being  
a scholar. Isacoff is essentially a journalist.
	Isacoff's book is really a "cultural history" with temperament as an  
excuse (he thought it very interesting that today musicians accept  
without question a tuning system that was so controversial in the  
past, and set out to tell the story of how that came to pass, in a  
fairly amusing way, throwing in all sorts of anecdotes about famous  
people of the past). Much of the reaction to his book is based on the  
subtitle, which was applied by his publisher. His own subtitle had to  
do with temperament being a riddle that engaged some of the greatest  
minds of western civilization, not with "solving" something. Partly  
due to the title, UET enthusiasts took great umbrage, and he was  
accused of the cardinal sin of saying that ET is the "ultimate  
solution."
	Duffin wrote in response to what Isacoff was accused of, and was bent  
on presenting the "other side of the story." The book is a parody of  
Isacoff's, written in much the same style and layout. But Duffin  
really is intent on selling his own pet theory: that 1/6 comma mean  
tone is the "ultimate solution." Personally, I think Isacoff's facts  
are more reliable in general (I have some very strong quibbles, an  
example being his misinterpretation based on a bad translation of  
Couperin's l'Art de Toucher, but that is very far off topic). Duffin  
is a textbook example of somebody with a foregone conclusion, cherry- 
picking evidence to "prove" it. Caveat lector! (Reader, beware!)
Regards,
Fred Sturm
fssturm at unm.edu
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to  
shape it.” Brecht

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