Rating: 
Summary: FASCINATING - A JOY TO READ!
Review: Stuart Isacoff has taken an esoteric subject that could be unbearably dry and he has crafted a fascinating and highly readable account of the history and importance of musical temperament. Musicians, musical instrument builders and technicians will be naturally drawn to the subject and they will find this work scholarly, witty and concise. Others with no apparent interest in temperament will discover a book that both enlightens and entertains. Pick it up, glance at virtually any page and you will be drawn into it; thus is reflected the skill of a gifted writer. Add to that the understanding of a gifted musician and you have the ingredients of a work that is in every respect a joy to read and to own. I recommend "Temperament" enthusiastically.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, meticulously researched, enjoyable reading
Review: Stuart Isacoff has written an accessible, fascinating and engaging book about a surprising subject. It is meticulously researched, with 13 page of bibliography. Clearly he is in total command of the subject. He makes the technical part of the story easy to follow through simple diagrams and references to popular music (it helps a little if you know how to sing the opening of "Kumbaya"). Isacoff also has fun with his subject which helps to make what could be a monotonous story into one that is much more entertaining. There is word play such as "the theme of gravity soared" and a large number of amusing diversions; some of which are scandalous. Other diversions are ironic such as his aside that a particularly extreme form of Calvinist punishment, "became one the few means of entertainment officially sanctioned." But this book is far more than the story of "music's greatest riddle." The main theme of the history of temperament is used as the basis for exploring the development of fundamental ideas through the millennia. It is here that his encyclopedic knowledge of the topic and the related history shine through. There is an accompanying a page on the Web with some audio examples. My regrets: Portions of the book are much too short. He crams a tremendous amount of information into too few pages. He should have taken the time to develop them more. Also, I hoped for more examples on the Internet. WARNING: Be sure to read to the end. The last chapter came as a genuine and very pleasant surprise.
Rating:
Summary: A Virtuoso Tour De Force
Review: Stuart Isacoff is a virtuoso author, pianist and composer. He is a writer who is always stimulating and meticulous, yet never dry. He constantly engages the reader with his lucid and persuasive writing. In Temperament, Mr. Isacoff has brought together his vast knowledge of music with his ability to convey the essence of complex cultural ideas. This is a book about an intricate and abstruse musical topic. However, even a reader with no special knowledge of music will be thrilled, entertained and fascinated with this sweeping history of Western Civilization. Temperament is a book which should be required reading for all musicians, music students, and music lovers.
Rating:
Summary: A magical musical illumination
Review: Temperament by Stuart Isacoff is an exhilarating journey through centuries of sublime thought, argument, invention, and progression guided by the search for a true structure of harmony. Isacoff notes that Leonardo da Vinci called music "the shaping of the invisible." As a reader unfamiliar with the finer points of musical theory, I say Isacoff is a shaper of the invisible. Read Temperament and you will experience music as never before.
Rating:
Summary: Temperanent: The Idea That Soved Music's Greatest Riddle
Review: Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest Riddle
is the best combination of literary and scientific writing I have ever encountered. If doctors could write like this, medical school would have been a joy. Marvin N. Cameron, MD.
Rating: 
Summary: A dubious jumble of facts and factoids -
Review: The author's history is suspect, he treats Equal Temperment as some great puzzle and religious battle, which was Fought Over
Millenia and finally Won by the Good Guys (the equal temperment crowd). It wasn't fought over millenia, as a credible idea
it's pretty darn recent, and it's not at all clear the good guys won. The book is incredibly disjointed, hopping around from art to philosophy, to science to architecture, and occasionally saying something -- often wrong -- about music. There are factual errors. The author seems to have the impression that the first harmonic of a tone is a fifth above it, which is just wrong. The inharmonicity of a piano string is, he claims, caused by the great tension it is under -- it is actually caused by the fact that a metal string acts a little bit like a metal bar, and not quite like a mathematically perfect string. He also drags in some poor fellow from China who seems to have observed that 749:500 is a pretty good ratio for a fifth, and claims (after an entire chapter devoted to getting to '749:500' that this fellow "solved equal temperment." In summary, a great waste of funds. Buy "The Piano Shop on the Left Bank" instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting subject, unsatisfactory treatment
Review: The book is too anecdotal, an amateurish cultural history. Many of the materials are not quite relevant. If the author stuck to the subject the pages could be two-third less. Hope someone will come up with a better one.
Rating: 
Summary: Meticulous re: ratios & tuning, but math's between the lines
Review: The core content of the book ie. the historical and mathematical explanations of ratios and tuning starting from Pythagoras's monochord. Pythagoras had two singlestringed instruments tuned to "do" with moveable bridges and kept making perfect fifths on one and higher octave "do"s on the other, the first twelve times and the latter seven times, and was just a smidgeon annoyed since (3/2)^12 (which works out to 129 and change) is not quite equal to 2^7 (which is 128.0). Thus arises the Pythagorean Comma. I have paraphrased the author but annoyingly he always leaves out any exponentiation or even ordinary manipulation of fractions where appropriate. You will see the ratios mentioned seperately, all the relevant discussion is accompanied by the piano keyboard drawing (redrawn and remarked in several pages, in various tuning attempts, very pedagogically and clearly set out), but the mathematically inclined reader with a passion for vulgar fractions such as the syntonic(80/81) (and even the fourth root of (80/81) to distribute the comma over four intervals), can do the math for himself ( aided by the author's text) and make marginal notes for additional edification and erudition. Contrary to someone's negative review, I found the accomanying history, and the running theme of culture and musical tuning very thought-provoking if not completely convincing. For the amount of ground covered and for the respect the author shows for his facts historical, and for his facts musical. The author's love for his subject and care for exposition are evident. This book is enjoyable and one to keep. I, for one, being more a math-head than a western-music-head, would only have wished for a few more fractions and decimals if only as an appendix. And "cent" the 1/1200 of the logarithmic ratio is not even mentioned. Another point where math might have made things clearer, while its omission makes for a little more obscurity is why (in Chapter 11) 749/500 worked out better as a fifth. The author informs us that in the East, in China, Prince Chu-Tsai-Yu, a descendant of a Ming emperor found this ahead of the discovery of equal temperament in the west. I saw at least one reviewer perplexed. Stuart Isacoff correctly says that closure after the twelve-cycle of fiths was ALMOST there. In equal-temperament, it would be 749.153538, pretty close!
Rating:
Summary: Pretentious and uninformative
Review: The theme of this book, the history behind modern tuning and its effect on the development of modern music and modern keyboard instruments, is a fascinating one. Sadly, Mr. Isacoff is more interested in letting us know that he's acquainted with celebrities, practices eastern meditation and is acquainted with books on a range of topics (e.g., medieval and renaissance Judaism and mathematics), than he is in coherently rendering his theme. This is the worst sort of non-academic history, an author who's unable to keep the story on track and is more interested in proving that he's interesting than in providing anything of value to the reader.
Rating:
Summary: A just-so story
Review: The trouble that this book has, in my opinion is that the same people who are going to be attracted to this book because of the title, (i.e historic performance folks) are going to be put off by the author's "equal-tempered triumphalism," for lack of a better term. Worse, the author seems to imply that "progress" occurs in music. At times I thought that the author was some kind of high-brow snob--how dare he dismiss Partch in a single sentence. All in all however, the book was well written and provided historical background. I think this book would make a great program on public television.
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