For those of you in Canada or in the States, IUP are offering a discount of 40% on all their books up to and including 15 June. They publish several works on or related to the harpsichord, including Edward Kottick’s A History of the Harpsichord and Yonit Lea Kosovske’s Historical Harpsichord Technique.
Website: https://iupress.org/springsale/
The promo code is: SPRINGSAVINGS.
Best,
Matthew
Thank you Matthew.
Veering off a tiny fraction, this looks like a very interesting work from the same press:
[Just by the way, if you paste a link on a line by itself Discourse puts a nice ‘onebox’, as in this post.]
Dear Bernard, this book was brought to attention years ago in HPSCDH-L, I believe
. It got some dismal reviews, such as this one, written anonymously by somebody claiming to be an American temperament expert:
I recommend reading the above review thoroughly. As an alternative, it recommends Lindley’s “Lutes, Viols and Temperaments”, a very serious book instead.
And I agree, up to a point, however: Lindley’s book is rich in history but less so in theory and actually poor in advise for putting unequal fretting into practice. Even worse, it scarcely deals with one of the most important matters: fretting in meantone. Which is why a few years ago I devoted lots of work to these very matters (see my own Unequal Temperaments book).
Best.
Oh, and by the way, there is also a favourable review!
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/689288
The review includes blatant errors. For example:
"Previous scholarship has documented the historical evidence for and against particular tuning schemes for these two instruments, but usually without offering clear guidance for historically minded performers. " Not true. My book of 1978 already did, improved by my book of 2008, eight years earlier than Dolata’s 2016.
" The first sets out to debunk the “myth” (p. 9) that the lute and viol were tuned exclusively in equal temperament during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. " Here the error is not in the reviewer but (unnoticed!) in the book’s writer. This “myth” was debunked decades ago, not only by my book but also by other respected writers.
Meantone fretting was already dealt with as early as 1974 in
Dombois, Eugen M. “Varieties of Meantone Temperament Realized on the Lute” in Journal of the Lute Society of America Vol. 7, 1974, pp. 82-89. Corrections in Vol. 8, 1975, p. 106 and Vol. 9, 1976, 108.
Thank you Claudio for your learned comments. I should not judge a book by its cover, or an attractive title.
On the contrary, Andrew, your comment was most welcome: not everybody knows … ! 