Books in Brief.('Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest Riddle')(Brief Article)

Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest Riddle, by Stuart Isacoff (Knopf, 259 pp., $23)

What do Pythagoras, Euclid, the 2nd-century b.c. Chinese thinker Huai Nan Tzu, Boethius, Giotto, Descartes, Shakespeare, Newton, Kepler, Rousseau, and contemporary composer Philip Glass have in common? Stuart Isacoff -- pianist, composer, and founding editor of Piano Today -- has woven them into a magnificent story about a great shift in the musical world that took place across centuries and engaged the attention of the Church, the academy, and every branch of the humanities. There are some things that seem so natural, so well established, that we cannot imagine them being any other way. Such is the case with temperament -- the way pianos (and other keyboard instruments) are tuned and how music sounds to our ear. But in fact equal temperament, the commonsense method we now use that divides the musical scale into perfectly equidistant steps, was once a radical idea resisted for centuries by philosophers, popes, kings, and composers.

Temperament involves altering certain mathematical proportions between notes in the musical scale. The vociferous objection to such tampering stemmed from a belief that God, as the Divine Geometer, had established inviolable and harmonious proportions; it was not right for man to meddle with the order of the universe. The problem, however, was that the ancient ideals of proportion were not harmonious -- in fact were downright ...