Nicola Vicentino: “Musica prisca caput”

From the album Nicola Vicentinos Enharmonik: Musik mit 31 Tönen

Patron saint of musical eccentrics, the composer and theorist Nicola Vicentino (1511-c. 1576) is one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian renaissance. Though he authored two books of madrigals and a handful of other compositions, Vicentino was best known for the unorthodox ideas about musical scales expressed in his 1555 treatise L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice).

Like many musicians of the time, Vicentino was obsessed with the idea of rediscovering the fabled magical power of the art that had been possessed by the ancient Greeks. Following Greek practice, Vicentino constructed scales on the basis of tetrachords, or series of intervals within the span of a perfect 4th. The Greeks recognized three types or genera of tetrachord: the diatonic, consisting of two whole tones and a semitone, the chromatic, with a major third and two semitones, and the enharmonic, made of intervals close to what we now call a major third and two quarter-tones (intervals half the size of a semitone). When all the tetrachords were put together, the result was a system of 31-tone equal temperament that could be used to approximate a form of just intonation.

Not content to rest on his theoretical laurels, in 1561 Vicentino built a novel instrument to realize his idiosyncratic musical ideals: the arcicembalo, a harpsichord constructed to produce no fewer than 31 tones in the octave. The keyboard was specially designed with three terraced levels of keys on each manual. The same year he also invented the arciorgano, a portative organ constructed along similar lines.

A modern reconstruction of Vicentino’s arcicembalo by M. Tiella

While Vicentino’s intentions were not particularly radical–he was more interested in perfecting meantone temperament than in the exploitation of microtonal intervals–his instruments nonetheless became legendary symbols of techno-musical experimentation. His ideas helped inspire not only the chromaticism of late Renaissance composers such as Gesualdo, Luzzaschi, and Monteverdi, but also the resurgent activity in microtonal music and instrument building in the 20th century.

The four-part Latin ode, “Musica prisca caput,” written in honor of Vicentino’s patron Ippolito d'Este, demonstrates neatly the three tetrachordal genera as Vicentino understood them. The three sections of this short composition are composed strictly in each of the three genera: diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic, respectively. The text reads:

Musica prisca caput tenebris modo sustulit altis, / Dulcibus ut numeris priscis certantia factis, / Facta tua, Hyppolite, excelsum super aethera mittat. (Ancient music has now borne its source from the nourishing shades, so that, Ippolito, it may send with sweet numbers your great deeds, in contest with ancient deeds, to a new height above the ether.)

The Latin reads “You have revealed to me the obscure and secret things of your science.”

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May 02, 2011, 8:23pm