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 <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> writes: > >>> On 2 Sep 2022, at 10:24, Johannes Keller <[email protected]> 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.
