Who first transposed tunes and when?

[Bob Stuckey]

The answer is Gorzanis in 1567 and Gorzanis 1567 is the title of the CD  of lutenest Michele Carreca which has just been released. 

https://www.ayros.eu/shop/gorzanis-1567/

On the music notation forum we search  for ideal ways to convey music which is mainly based on equal temperament. Where did this special tuning come from?

In the Renaissance the lutenists experimented with sliding the frets up and down to get the ideal position for  major and minor triads wherever they were needed. Gradually the rule of 18 evolved: to position the next fret divide the remaining string into 18 parts and slide the fret so that it shortens the string by 1/18. This is how equal temperament came into being. In 1567 the blind lutenist Gorzanis realised that they could now transpose whole pieces. To demonstrate this he took two well known chord sequences used by the dance bands of the time, one in the minor and one in the major and began improvisations on each ascending fret. I asked lutenist Michele Carreca who had already brought out a CD of Gorzanis' work to record the cycle of Lute Dances on Every Fret.

The recording was made in a church with beautiful acoustics and  engineered by Marco Vitale who, besides being a harpsichodist and organist runs Ayros Records.

After the recording Michele wrote a commentary for the CD and I contributed a chronology of equal temperament from ancient China to Schoenberg and Miles Davis. I circulated earlier drafts of the chronology on the forum. Michele's commentary and the chronology appear in Itialian and English. We were helped at every stage of this project by the National Early Music Association (UK).

The fret placement that created transposiablity has had a lasting effect on music history spreading to every instrument of the orchestra and many genres worldwide. The lutenists developed a tablature that simply counted up to the fret where the finger should be placed, like guitar tablature. There is a huge quantity of lute tablature in archives that has never been transcribed. It is a chromatic notation of sorts but octave-deaf and difficult to apply to other instruments.

Michele and I had scheduled a concert with dancers in Renaissance costume at the Edinburgh Festival last year but covid put that on hold.

As I was drafting the chronolgy I became increasingly uncomfortable with the terms half step and semitone. Surely such a basic unit deserves its own name rather than being half of something else much less important. I came up with fretet as fret+et for equal temperament. Guitar fret is an alternative that everyone understands.

To celebrate the release of the CD I wrote a little poem which I hope you enjoy. Bob

Ugly Little Fretet

Ode to a ratio

What are your virtues, little 17/18?

Surely not that you are harmonious,

You, the most jangling of all discords

Like your brothers and sisters

 16/17 and  18/19

A miserable squabbling bunch,

And surely not because we love

Your shared harmonics

of which there are none within earshot.

So what then are your virtues

That make you the little brick

From which great mansions and cathederals are built?

A single one.

Who needs more?

Unlike your next of kin 16/17 and 18/19

When when repeated a dozen times

You reach the height of the magnificent 1/2,

The mighty octave

To whom all tribes on earth pay hommage

And en route you get close enough to

Other venerables 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6,

And those of lesser grandure 6/7, 7/8, 8/9, and 9/10

Well, close enough to fool

Most of the people most of the time.

Postscript

t

[Dominique Waller]

Hi Bob,

I was very interested by your last mail. It confirms that Equal Temperament was first needed, theorized, and applied on the lute, even before keyboards, which is largely ignored and will seem strange to many.

Concerning a unit of measure for the equal-tempered semitone, it already exists, but for some reason was forgotten: it’s called the prony, after the name of mathematician and engineer Gaspard de Prony (1755-1839) who worked on many various physical, technological and mathematical matters, as it was usual at that time. This word is rarely mentioned, even on Wikipedia. I guess it’s probably because this unit was deprived of any industrial utility…

French Wikipedia : « Il a donné en 1832, peut-être influencé par sa femme, un traité sur les intervalles musicaux. Ayant travaillé à la décimalisation des angles, il suggérait de mesurer aussi les intervalles musicaux par une unité décimale qui corresponde à des intervalles bien connus des musiciens, soit l'octave, comme l'avait indiqué Leonhard Euler, soit le demi-ton de la gamme au tempérament égal, suivant la préconisation de Lambert. Il publiait dans l'ouvrage des tables de logarithme en base deux, qui permettent de passer du rapport des fréquences des notes à un intervalle exprimé en octaves, et à l'intervalle exprimé en demi-tons décimaux. Ce travail n'avait pas eu de postérité — Pierre Larousse ne le mentionne pas dans son Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle. Alexander John Ellis l'a repris à la fin du XIXe siècle pour proposer le demi-ton décimal, dont la centième partie s'emploie désormais sous le nom de cent, remarquant que les décimales au-delà du centième de demi-ton sont inutiles. »

So, 100 cents = 1 prony.

Besides, I enjoyed your poem!

Best wishes for your CD,

Dominique

[Bob Stuckey]

Thanks Dominique

I hadnever come across prony. So Ellis' cents were only reinventing the prony. Too late, unfortunately to make it onto the choronology in the CD info.  Perhaps for the second edition. As you can imagine I prefer fretet as is it has all the history wrapped up in it (and the et at the end as a reference to ET and suggesting the baby fret).

While the lute fret 17/18 was championed by Vincenzo Galilei. He wrote an enormous cycle on Goraznis' model - so enormous that just one third of it fills one CD The Well-Tempered Lute by Zak Ozmo. Zak is taking a well-earned rest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1uvffo2bPs

Galilei didn't have the sophisitcated maths of Simon Stevin who came up with the modern definition the 12th root of 2 in 1605 which got cemented into guitar frets. But there's only a few cents difference which didn't bother anyone for at least a hundred years.

Bob

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[Evael]

Many folk musicians transposed tunes since time immemorial. Probably thousands of years ago.

[Bob Stuckey]

Hi Evael

I'm sure people have transposed throughout history but rarely systematically through 12 steps which you can only do if the frets are evenly spaced as they came to be because of the rule of 18 (shorten the remaining string by 1/18 to place the next fret). I think Gorzanis in 1567 was the first apart from the  Chinese court of the Marquis of Yi some  two thousand years before.

BTW you may like the video A Renaissance Jam Session which shows the dance chord sequences that Gorzanis used using the jazz program iReal Pro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7af3OQgnrs&t=5s

Bob

On Sun, 12 Dec 2021 at 20:59, Evael <adxo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Many folk musicians transposed tunes since time immemorial. Probably thousands of years ago.

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