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Stuart Isacoff
June 13, 2006 Pain Hall Harvard University, Rm. 2 Playbill New York Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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Doors open at 6:15
Chapter Business Meeting 7pm Presentation by Stuart Isacoff 7:30pm |
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| Temperament: How Music Became A Battleground For The Great Minds Of Western Civilization In a multi-media presentation employing musical performance on pianos in different tunings, visual images and a bit of theater, writer, pianist and composer Stuart Isacoff takes us on a journey through history to unveil the little known story of fierce battles over music that engaged philosophers, popes, scientists, musicians and artists across many centuries. At the center of these fights was a fundamental question: does nature, filled with laws for the workings of our physical world, have rules governing how we should select the notes of our musical scales? In a time when science, art, politics and religion were tightly woven strands in the fabric of Western civilization, this was no small issue. At stake were the very underpinnings of God’s grand design. Indeed, the combatants included such powerful figures as Pythagoras and Plato, St. Augustine, Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Rousseau and many others. You’ll learn: • How Johannes Kepler came to believe that the planets in their orbits obeyed musical laws; • Why Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock and discovered the rings of Saturn, decided to create a keyboard with 31 tones to the octave (as opposed to today’s 12); • How Galileo’s father, Vincenzo, became embroiled in a fight with the most important music theorist of his day, and ended up inventing the modern tuning for the guitar; • Why the tuning we hear on today’s pianos was once considered a crime against nature… and why without it, some of our most beloved musical works could never have been written! This lecture/recital is based on Mr. Isacoff’s critically acclaimed book, Temperament (Knopf and Vintage), described by The Economist as “immensely entertaining, original and informative,” and by National Review as “a whirlwind tour through the history of Western culture, told with flair and grace.” The New York Times Book Review declared: “Isacoff untangles the complexities… with the aplomb of a virtuoso pianist playing scales.” Stuart Isacoff is the founding editor of the magazine Piano Today, a pianist and composer, and the author of, in addition to Temperament, a large body of music books and collections published by Boosey & Hawkes, G. Schirmer, Associated Music, Carl Fischer, Warner Bros., Music Sales Corp., and Ekay Music. He is a recipient of the prestigious ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music, and has been a contributor on musical subjects to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Sun, The Grove Dictionary of Music in America, Musical America, Chamber Music, Symphony, National Review, Connoisseur, New York Newsday and others. As a pianist, lecturer, and competition judge, Stuart Isacoff has appeared at such venues as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sarah Lawrence College, Purchase College, and the Caramoor Center for the Arts in New York; the Verbier Festival & Academy in Verbier, Switzerland; the Van Cliburn Piano Institute in Ft. Worth; the Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation in Salt Lake City; and the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo. Equally at home in the worlds of classical music and jazz, he believes that the walls traditionally set up between these genres are artificial, and his unique piano recitals combine classical repertoire with improvisation — bridging musical works written centuries and continents apart. |
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