Talk by Ross Duffin - Cambridge Tuning Abstracts 1

Intonation has a default system, equal temperament, which is thought to have a kind of Darwinian authority. This has made it easy to ignore historical and musical evidence that equal temperament is not what composers from Bach to Debussy were using, both for keyboard and for other instruments and voices. How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and why you should care) was judged by the Guardian as ‘enjoyably pugnacious’, and by Fanfare as ‘the most subversive book on a musical subject’. Judge for yourself as Duffin introduces his ‘elegantly argued’ book.