Added to your basket:
Del numero e delle misure delle corde musiche e loro corrispondenze.  Dissertazione del P. D. Giovenale Sacchi Bernabita. 

Checkout now

First edition of Sacchi’s first work: a theoretical study of music and acoustic from a mathematical and physical perspective built upon the most innovative eighteenth-century physics. 

Galilei, Kapler, Newton, Mersenne, and contemporary works on the nature of air form the basis of Sacchi’s study of strings and their number, ratio, length and correspondence, as the basis for the solution of the problem of temperament.  Sacchi’s innovation takes the cue from Newton’s parallel treatment of optics and acoustics and his matching of the seven musical tones with seven light bands obtained from a prism.  Sacchi suggests matching the seven colours with eleven strings (the twelfth corresponding to the first) instead of seven, to outline a major and minor mode, and provides for each of them a fractional formula. 

Sacchi went on to publish other tracts on musical theory, and to become the first biographer of Farinelli. 

Riccardi I/2, p. 406. 

You may also be interested in...

TRADERS OR PIRATES?
TESTING THE POLITICS OF NEUTRALITY ANSWER OF THE MERCHANTS-PETITIONERS,

and Trustees for the Factory at Legorn, to the Account of Damages, laid to the Charge of the Great Duke of Toscany, by Sir Alexander Rigby, Mr. Will. Shepherd, and Mr. Will. Plowman: together with their Reply … With several other Matters and Papers since come to Hand from Legorn.

First and only edition, scarce, part of a fascinating trade (and piracy) dispute involving English merchants in Livorno (or Leghorn), which brought England and Tuscany to the brink of war in 1704.

Read more

HOFMANNSTHAL, Hugo von.

Die Aegyptische Helena. Oper in zwei Aufzügen.

First edition of Hofmannsthal’s text for Richard Strauss’s opera – Hofmannsthal himself considered it to be his finest libretto. The opera was first performed on 6 June 1928 in Dresden, five weeks before Hofmannsthal’s death. The plot is a free adaptation of Euripides’ Helena, which introduces an Egyptian princess and sorceress, Aitra, into the story of Helen of Troy and her vengeful husband Menelaeus. Aitra assuages the husband’s anger and restores conjugal harmony.

Read more