Treatise on the tuning of the Harpsichord

Summary

Man naturally delights in music. The more harmonious it is, the more it charms and gratifies the spirits it touches.

Our ancestors, having recognized that the human voice produced beautiful melodies, took pleasure in fashioning, for greater convenience, an instrument that could imitate the voice, or come as close to it as possible. All things considered, they could have taken up no instrument more appropriate than the harpsichord, though it was not yet known. But since they recognized the differences between tones by way of the voice, they began to create the keyboard, which is the most wonderful invention in the world and the means whereby music may be better comprehended. Music is based upon six monosyllables, namely ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and upon the interval defined by two of these syllables, mi and fa, which our ancestors placed just at the middle, as if to show that everything depends on these two.

They began to build a keyboard, that is, keys without feintes or sharps. As proof of this, the feintes and sharps have no proper [solmization] syllables of their own, only those that they borrow from the [natural] keys. For example, C sol, ut, fa [C♮] has a feinte which is called the feinte of C sol, ut, fa.