Johnny Reinhard's Vivaldi Question

I'll guess extended mean tone. Would the answer be obtainable
by deep digging into old books, etc.? An American music
encyclopedia published in 1854 describes a "wolf" occurring
between the "bearing notes" of keyed instruments. The
size of this wolf is called a diaschisma, which, reckoning
from other entries in the encyclopedia computes to about
36 cents (half a minor semitone). It would be almost 39 cents
if it were half a minor mean tone semitone, but I think
it's half of the step 1/1 to 25/24, which is about 72 cents.
It's quite a distance from Italy around 1700 to the United
States in 1854, but at least quarter comma mean tone seems
to have been still around that recently in some parts of the
world. I'd bet that if one had the patience to dig through
newspapers from the 19th century in a place like the New
York library, some extremely informative little gems of
information about earlier tuning practices would likely
come to light. I recall visiting a library in France -
Quimper in Brittany - where there were books from at least
as far back as the 18th century in their collection of books.
If one were to dig through some old libraries in Europe, one
might be able to piece together a pretty good picture of what
really was going on with tuning systems from earlier times.

Dave Hill, Borrego Springs, CA

--- In tuning@y..., ASCEND11@A... wrote:

> If one were to dig through some old libraries in Europe, one
> might be able to piece together a pretty good picture of what
> really was going on with tuning systems from earlier times.

i think this is exactly what people like lindley and chesnut have
done, and it's great that we have their summaries, but of course
there's no substitute for first-hand materials.