Re: Vicentino's keyboard as guide for voices -- for Paul Erlich

Hello, there, and this is a quick reply to a recent post by Paul
Erlich in the thread about European compositional tradition and JI
initiated by Dave Hill.

In response to my mention of Vicentino's recommendation (1555) that
singers use his archicembalo as a guide to vocal intonation, Paul asks
which instrument (or in this case tuning) Vicentino might have meant. My
suspicion is that he might have meant either his first tuning in 31-note
meantone (close to 31-tone equal temperament or 31-tet), with the 5
remaining notes of the instrument tuned to provide a few pure fifiths
(adaptive just intonation) or his second tuning with the first 19 notes in
meantone, and the other 17 tuned in pure fifths with these.

Clearly Vicentino intended singers especially to rely on his
instrument in his first tuning, because intervals a diesis (about
1/5-tone) smaller or larger than the usual ones (e.g. a "proximate
minor third" enlarged by a diesis, ~11:9) would be unfamiliar. Writing
about 25 years later, Vincenzo Galilei reports that singers indeed
relied upon the archicembalo for their tunings of Vicentino's
enharmonic music; while Galilei is not a favorable critic, this part
of his report would fit Vicentino's own advocacy of the instrument as
a standard of intonation.

However, Vicentino might also have intended singers to emulate his
second tuning, the "adaptive 5-limit tuning" in which pure fifths (and
minor thirds) may be substituted for tempered ones.

Incidentally, Vicentino did design two different keyboard instruments,
apparently both sharing the same two alternative 36-note tunings: the
archicembalo or "superharpsichord" and the arciorgano or "superorgan,"
the latter a kind of portable organ which could be transposed on the
back of a mule and assembled at the destination. While a "portative"
organ was a smaller instrument carried by the player, the category of
a "positive" organ might fit this instrument.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net