Fifteenth-Century Evidence for Meantone Temperament

Abstract

In the year 1496 Franchino Gafurio referred to the use of tempered fifths on the organ, but he did not specify the amount of the tempering, and Murray Barbour has concluded that ‘we have no way of knowing what temperament was like’ at that time. I believe, however, that a careful analysis of contemporary theoretical writings, and particularly of the information given by Ramos de Pareja in his Musica Practica of 1482, will show that the kind of tuning in question was almost certainly some form of regular meantone temperament, that is, with the fifths tempered rather more than in equal temperament for the sake of more resonant thirds and sixths.

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