Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization by Stuart Isacoff

Author:Stuart Isacoff [Isacoff, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307560513
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-16T02:00:00+00:00

An infuriated audience rioted. One George Abbot was a witness to the proceedings. He later reported that Bruno, a man “with a name longer than his body,” had chased after fame by endorsing the opinion of Copernicus that the earth went around while the heavens stood still. “Whereas in truth,” wrote Abbot, “it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still.”

Hauled before the church authorities time and again, Bruno would manage for brief periods to restrain his ferocious spirit just long enough to make an apology; he always went free. At the last, he ended the contest of wills by refusing to recant. “Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it,” he announced, and for his trouble was burned alive at the stake.

Vincenzo Galilei’s stance on musical tunings veered perilously close to Bruno’s admonition to the poets: Throw off the yoke of authority, he told them; there are no rules other than the ones you make.

Vincenzo’s son, Galileo, shared similar ideas, and had the same difficulty in adhering to official doctrine. “I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use,” he once stated. By the end of his life, however, he found himself kneeling before the Roman authorities dressed in white penitent’s robes and, under command of the Holy Office, renouncing Copernicus’s teaching that the earth revolves around the sun.

Science and music had by now joined hands to walk along a single path. Galileo’s views on the latter, however, placed him on safer ground, where the transgressions were more subtle and less damaging to pontifical authority. Nevertheless, they still provoked. Bruno had run up against the church in declaring the universe infinite; Vincenzo Galilei had run up against Zarlino in proposing a musical universe of infinite number. If his father was correct in saying that scales are manmade and not a product of Zarlino’s magic numbers, asked Galileo, why do the heavens seem to smile on certain combinations of tones and frown on others? Surely, he thought, there is a scientific explanation. Hence he set out to develop a theory of consonance, and formed it while observing his tremulous pendulums. Once again, however, fellow scientist and equal-temperament advocate Giovanni Battista Benedetti had been there first.

Benedetti’s theory was as follows. Since the octave is produced by two strings vibrating in the ratio 2:1, the pulses issuing from the higher string and the ones from the lower one will meet in agreement every second time. As the ratios producing various harmonies become more complex, however, they create pulses that meet less and less often. Therefore they sound less consonant. So, despite the claims of Pythagoras and Zarlino, claimed Benedetti, there is no fixed set of harmonious ratios: Dissonance occurs on a sliding scale.

Galileo built on this argument. Take two vibrating strings in the proportion 3:2, he explained. Their pulses

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