Abstract

Sometime between 1589 and 1591, a momentous discovery was announced in Florence; or, at least, a discovery thought to be momentous by its promoter: "The true form of the octave is the octuple [ratio 8:1] and not the duple [2:1]".1 Thus taken out of context, we might be forgiven if we failed either to share the author's enthusiasm or to recognize the importance of his finding. But the fact remains that, sadly, nobody else did either: not only did his contemporaries decline to adopt this dramatic solution to the problem of the musical consonances,2 but even those who may take an almost perverse interest at times in the forgotten or the misbegotten—among others, historians of...