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Re: Create 16th-century microtonal accidental


From: Hans Åberg
Subject: Re: Create 16th-century microtonal accidental
Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2022 17:58:40 +0200

The Harvard Concise says that in the 15th century, the term diesis was used to 
denote the sharp, and that the microtonal interpretations are modern.


> On 4 Sep 2022, at 17:44, Johannes Keller <johannkell@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thank you for these thoughts. I'm aware of the Helmholtz-Ellis notation
> and decided not to use it (or any other contemporary approach to
> microtonality). My thesis is that Vicentino's notation is in fact a
> tabulature for his Archicembalo / Arciorgano (keyboard instruments with
> up to 36 keys per octave), so they are a reference to a location on the
> keyboard, not to a specific pitch (be it relative or absolute). Since
> the tuning of those instruments is context-dependent it would be
> confusing to define the 'meaning' of the notation in terms of exact
> interval sizes. I'm happy to discuss this further in case you are
> interested, but maybe we better do that off the lilypond-list.
> 
> 
> Hans Åberg <haberg-1@telia.com> writes:
> 
>>> On 2 Sep 2022, at 10:24, Johannes Keller <johannkell@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I would like to use Lilypond for a critical edition of Nicola
>>> Vicentino's treatise "L'antica musica" (Rome 1555). The original
>>> notation uses an unconventional accidental to indicate a pitch
>>> modification of a "Diesis" (ca. 1/5 of a whole tone).
>> …
>>> Examples of the original notation can be found here, see for example
>>> fol. 12v (PDF p. 24):
>>> 
>>> http://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/9/94/IMSLP114662-PMLP210243-lantica_musica.pdf
>> 
>> In case you would want to translate into modern microtonal notation:
>> 
>> The enharmonic diesis 128/125, the difference between an octave 2 and
>> three Just Intonation major thirds 5/4, is actually an interval of
>> relative scale degree 1, not an accidental, or an interval of relative
>> scale degree 0.
>> 
>> So this means that if this old manuscript, where the enharmonic diesis
>> is written as an accidental, is translated into modern Helmholtz-Ellis
>> notation, the note ends on the position one above in the staff
>> notation, with a triple raised syntonic comma 81/80, combined with
>> some other accidental like a flat or double flat.




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