Re: Create 16th-century microtonal accidental

[Johannes Keller]

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.