Dissertation Index
Author: Bennett Holmes, Julian Title: Shades of the Ancient Greek Genera and Vicentino’s Archicembalo in the 21st Century Institution: Manhattan School of Music Begun: September 2018 Completed: May 2025 Abstract: In 1555, the Italian composer and theorist Nicola Vicentino published “L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica” (“ancient music adapted to modern practice”), which purported to adapt ancient Greek theories of tuning to modern music. In the book, Vicentino describes a 36-note-per-octave keyboard instrument, the archicembalo, that can be used to demonstrate the ideas of the text, and in 1561, Vicentino had such an instrument built. In this dissertation, I show how the actual ideas of ancient Greece were distorted by medieval theorists and only partially recovered by Renaissance scholars. I then show that Vicentino disguised his own original ideas as interpretations of concepts from ancient Greece, hoping that this framing would improve the reception of his work. Finally, I show how recent musicians rediscovered Vicentino’s work, adapting his ideas to their own modern practices. Keywords: tuning, temperament, Vicentino, archicembalo, intervals, intonation TOC: Introduction 1. Ancient Greek theories of intervals and tuning Pythagoras and the division of the monochord The genera of ancient Greece 2. Medieval theories and their precursors Boethius’s “De institutione musica” The “Musica enchiriadis” and the “Scolica enchiriadis” The “Enchiridion musices” 3. The Renaissance revival of the Greek systems Valla and Tinctoris translate and discover Aristoxenus Ramis’s “Musica Practica” and the return of just intonation The theoretical basis of just intonation Musica practica: the mouse and the elephant united 4. Nicola Vicentino’s invention The debate between Lusitano and Vicentino The scholarly marketing of Vicentino’s ideas The background of Vicentino’s tonal system Composing with 31 tones per octave: Vicentino’s tonal theory The archicembalo itself 6. Vicentino’s ideas are lost… Christiaan Huygens temporarily defeats Vicentino Later 12-note systems by: Andreas Werckmeister, Johann Georg Neidhardt, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, and Thomas Young 7.…and rediscovered in the twentieth century Julián Carrillo Trujillo Harry Partch and the return to ancient Greece Vicentino rediscovered by scholars and instrument builders… …and by composers Appendix: Selected bibliography of 21st-century compositions based on the tuning system described by Nicola Vicentino Contact: Julian Bennett Holmes julianbennettholmes@icloud.com |