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How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care).

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How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care). By Ross W. Duffin. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. [196 p. ISBN-10: 0393062279; ISBN-13: 9780393062274. $25.95.] Illustrations, appendix, endnotes, bibliography, sources and permissions, index.

I became interested in reading this book because of a persistent problem encountered by traditional fiddlers. Classical violinists frequently tell fiddlers that they are playing out of tune. One specific problem is that many fiddlers tend to play the third degree of the major scale flat, when compared with the scale used by classical players. This little book sheds a great deal of light on this problem and many others encountered with harmonic intonation in Western music.

Ross W. Duffin is the Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University and is a distinguished scholar of early music. One of his previous works, Shakespeare's Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), won the first Claude V. Palisca Award of the American Musicological Society. This current work tackles the thorny problems of tuning and temperament in Western music. His goals are "to show that before the standardization of ET [equal temperament] became so overwhelming that nobody got to hear anything else...

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