Howard Goodall's Big Bangs

Accidentals will happen: The Invention of Equal Temperament (1x3)

Air date: Mar 26, 2000

This was easily the most challenging subject for Howard to explain to his viewers… a subject of which even the more musical amongst them may not be aware. And yet he could not possibly have omitted it from the series, as Equal Temperament, the tuning system by which notes are organised in Western Music, has shaped its history in such a way that enormous amounts of the world’s most beautiful music would not have been written without it. This is, perhaps, the Biggest of the Bangs.