Nicola Vicentino

Dear list members,

Apologies for assuming that Nicola Vicentino wrote a piece
for 4 viols (31 tones/octave)

This is originally a 4 part madrigal, which is followed by infor-
mation on how to fret lutes and viols to his enharmonic 31 notes
octave tuning.... why??? .... probably with the idea of playing
the madrigal on a fix pitch instrument in order to train the
singers.

His archicembalo obviously, dindn't give a sustained tone, but
I think he built a portative organ (31 tones/octave) which
would probably give better idea to the singers of the sound
of the madrigal. Anyway, I think this portative organ didn't
have enough range to play the madrigal.

Going to the point...Nicola Vicentino didn't seem to state
very clear if he meant a 31tone 1/4-comma meantone tuning
or a 31 ET, which in fact doesn't make much difference.
Since the use of logaritmic calculation wasn't discovered
until XVII century, I presume that he thought of meantone
as sounding equal tempered.

Tony Salinas

Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl
with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 19 Mar 1997 13:53 +0100
Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA05782; Wed, 19 Mar 1997 13:53:09 +0100
Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA05785
Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI)
id EAA12177; Wed, 19 Mar 1997 04:50:26 -0800
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 04:50:26 -0800
Message-Id: <009B17F4D1827D01.756C@vbv40.ezh.nl>
Errors-To: madole@mills.edu
Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu
Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu