On Oct 18, 2007, at 3:29 AM, Martyn Hodgson wrote: > Note also that one of the very few examples of early practice using > 'meantone' Lindley could detect (in Luis Milan's works) was based > on his belief that Milan always avoided certain frets: in fact > later work looking at all of Milan's output shows that this was not > the case.
Lindley's inability to detect evidence of unequal temperament is astonishing at times, as is his ineptitude in explaining it away when it's too obvious to ignore. On page 22 of his book, Lindley cites Valderrabano's duets for lutes a minor third apart as evidence of equal temperament, and then on page 55 notes that Valderrabano instructed players to adjust frets, apparently without understanding that those instructions would be unnecessary if the instruments were in ET. Giovanni Battista Doni wrote quite clearly that lutes have a wider interval between the second and third frets than between the first and second. Lindley dismisses the remark as "question-begging" because Doni phrases it as a rhetorical question, showing, among other things, that Lindley doesn't know what "question-begging" means (almost nobody does these days, but that's what editors are supposed to be for). -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
