The author will help you discover the history of the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. And see how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, and boogie, to bebop and beyond.

Learn how Mozart unveiled his monumental concertos in Vienna’s coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet picture European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush hear about Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother and of Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. His book, A Natural History of the Piano, distills a lifetime of research and passion in one brilliant narrative. TEMPERAMENT: The Idea That Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle. However, the focus is not on a modern invention, but rather a modern convention: that of tuning keyboards so that every key is equally in tune-and equally out of tune.

Why the resistance to equal temperament lasted so long, and how it was finally overcome, is a story that encompasses crucial elements of Western culture - social history, religion, philosophy, science, economic development - in a period when Europe was struggling to give birth to the modern age.In this multi-media presentation, the author unfolds the history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. Involving mathematics, philosophy, aesthetics, religion, politics, and physics, Stuart Isacoff s Temperament invokes the tone of a James Burke documentary. Stuart Isacoff hereby recounts this great battle over the best way to create music - a battle that culminated in the destruction of the harpsichord and the emergence, from its flames, of the piano. For hundreds of years, musicians, craftsmen, church officials, heads of state and philosophers fought heatedly against the introduction of 'equal temperament' tuning.

It is difficult now to imagine the keyboard as other than it is yet this was precisely what many European musicians practising before the nineteenth century demanded of their instruments. But this 'equal temperament' tuning was once a hugely controversial notion. The piano is the best loved of musical instruments, thanks in part to the elegant symmetrical design of its ivory and ebony keyboard that ensures each pitch is reliably equidistant from the next.

Temperament by stuart isacoff