source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 04:22:01 -0800 Subject: Nicola Vicentino From: TONY SALINAS 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