Francisco de Salinas
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Francisco de Salinas (1513,
Burgos Burgos () is a city in Spain located in the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is the capital and most populated municipality of the province of Burgos. Burgos is situated in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, on the confluence of t ...
– 1590, Salamanca) was a Spanish music theorist and organist, noted as among the first to describe
meantone temperament Meantone temperament is a musical temperament, that is a tuning system, obtained by narrowing the fifths so that their ratio is slightly less than 3:2 (making them ''narrower'' than a perfect fifth), in order to push the thirds closer to pure. Me ...
in mathematically precise terms, and one of the first (along with Guillaume Costeley) to describe, in effect,
19 equal temperament In music, 19 Tone Equal Temperament, called 19 TET, 19 EDO ("Equal Division of the Octave"), or 19  ET, is the tempered scale derived by dividing the octave into 19 equal steps (equal frequency ratios). Each step represent ...
. In his ''De musica libri septem'' of 1577 he discusses 1/3-, 1/4- and 2/7-comma meantone tunings. Of 1/3-comma meantone, which is essentially identical to the meantone of 19-et, he remarks that it is "languid" but not "offensive to the ear", and he notes that a keyboard of 19 tones to the octave suffices to give a circulating version of meantone. The 19th-century musicologist
Alexander John Ellis Alexander John Ellis, (14 June 1814 – 28 October 1890), was an English mathematician, philologist and early phonetician who also influenced the field of musicology. He changed his name from his father's name, Sharpe, to his mother's maiden na ...
maintained that Salinas really meant to characterize 1/6-comma meantone, and made a mistake due to his blindness. Others point out that Salinas's descriptions of his tuning as "languid" but not "offensive to the ear" seem to apply to 1/3-comma meantone, not to 1/6-comma meantone, which in any case has a much sharper fifth than musicians of Salinas's own time preferred. Salinas was also interested in just intonation, and advocated a
5-limit Five-limit tuning, 5-limit tuning, or 5-prime-limit tuning (not to be confused with 5-odd-limit tuning), is any system for tuning a musical instrument that obtains the frequency of each note by multiplying the frequency of a given reference note ...
just intonation scale of 24 notes he called ''instrumentum perfectum''.


Biography

Salinas was born in
Burgos Burgos () is a city in Spain located in the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is the capital and most populated municipality of the province of Burgos. Burgos is situated in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, on the confluence of t ...
in 1513, the son of the treasurer to emperor
Charles I Charles I may refer to: Kings and emperors * Charlemagne (742–814), numbered Charles I in the lists of Holy Roman Emperors and French kings * Charles I of Anjou (1226–1285), also king of Albania, Jerusalem, Naples and Sicily * Charles I of ...
. He was blind from the age of eleven. He studied humanities, singing and organ at the
University of Salamanca The University of Salamanca ( es, Universidad de Salamanca) is a Spanish higher education institution, located in the city of Salamanca, in the autonomous community of Castile and León. It was founded in 1218 by King Alfonso IX. It is th ...
. He then entered the service of a relative, archbishop Pedro Sarmiento de Salinas, and accompanied him when Sarmiento followed emperor Charles to Rome in 1538. Sarmiento was elevated to the cardinalate that year, and Salinas took the holy orders and was granted an annual pension by Pope
Paul III Pope Paul III ( la, Paulus III; it, Paolo III; 29 February 1468 – 10 November 1549), born Alessandro Farnese, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 13 October 1534 to his death in November 1549. He came to ...
. Salinas lived in Rome for the next 23 years. In 1553, he became the organist at the court of Naples, where he was under the patronage of the then
Viceroy of Naples This is a list of viceroys of the Kingdom of Naples. Following the conquest of Naples by Louis XII of France in 1501, Naples was subject to the rule of the foreign rulers, the Kings of France, Aragon and Spain and the Habsburg Archdukes of Austria ...
, the
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. While in Naples, he befriended
Diego Ortiz Diego Ortiz (c. 1510 – c. 1576) was a Spanish composer and music theorist in service to the viceroy of Naples ruled by the Spanish monarchs Charles V and Philip II. Ortiz published the first manual on ornamentation for bowed string inst ...
, who served there as
Kapellmeister (, also , ) from German ''Kapelle'' (chapel) and ''Meister'' (master)'','' literally "master of the chapel choir" designates the leader of an ensemble of musicians. Originally used to refer to somebody in charge of music in a chapel, the term ha ...
; he also became acquainted with
Orlando di Lasso Orlande de Lassus ( various other names; probably – 14 June 1594) was a composer of the late Renaissance. The chief representative of the mature polyphonic style in the Franco-Flemish school, Lassus stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palest ...
and
Tomás Luis de Victoria Tomás Luis de Victoria (sometimes Italianised as ''da Vittoria''; ) was the most famous Spanish composer of the Renaissance. He stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus as among the principal composers of the late Ren ...
. In 1559, he returned to Spain and took up a position as organist at the
Cathedral of Sigüenza A cathedral is a church (building), church that contains the ''cathedra'' () of a bishop, thus serving as the central church of a diocese, Annual conferences within Methodism, conference, or episcopate. Churches with the function of "cathedral ...
, where he worked until moving to a similar position at the Cathedral of León in 1561. In 1567 he took up the professorship of music at the
University of Salamanca The University of Salamanca ( es, Universidad de Salamanca) is a Spanish higher education institution, located in the city of Salamanca, in the autonomous community of Castile and León. It was founded in 1218 by King Alfonso IX. It is th ...
, where he met the celebrated poet
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, also a professor at the university. In 1571, alongside Fray Luis de León and Diego de Castilla (then the
rector Rector (Latin for the member of a vessel's crew who steers) may refer to: Style or title *Rector (ecclesiastical), a cleric who functions as an administrative leader in some Christian denominations *Rector (academia), a senior official in an edu ...
of the University of Salamanca), he formed part of the jury for the literary prize that had been organised to celebrate the Spanish victory at the
Battle of Lepanto The Battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement that took place on 7 October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic states (comprising Spain and its Italian territories, several independent Italian states, and the Soverei ...
and the birth of prince Ferdinand. Fray
Luis de Leon Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish form of the originally Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese and Galician, in Aragonese and Catalan, while is archai ...
admired Salinas greatly, and in 1577 wrote a famous ode, the ''Oda a Francisco Salinas'', in homage to the musician. Most of Salinas' work was published while he worked at Salamanca. In 1577 he authored his treatise ''De Musica libri septem'', where he described
meantone temperament Meantone temperament is a musical temperament, that is a tuning system, obtained by narrowing the fifths so that their ratio is slightly less than 3:2 (making them ''narrower'' than a perfect fifth), in order to push the thirds closer to pure. Me ...
for the first time. He taught
Vicente Espinel Vicente Gómez Martínez-Espinel (; 28 December 15504 February 1624) was a Spanish writer and musician of the Siglo de Oro. He is credited the creation of the modern poetic form of the ''décima'', composed of ten octameters, named '' espinela' ...
, who later said of Salinas that he was ''"the most learned man in speculative music that the world has known since antiquity."''Conant, Isabel Pope. "Vicente Espinel as a Musician." Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 133-144. Although by all accounts a highly reputed organist, all of his own compositions have been lost. He died at Salamanca in 1590.


References

*Salinas, Francisco de, ''De musica libri septem'', Mathias Gastius, Salamanca, 1577, 1592. Reprint M.S. Kastner (ed.), Documenta Musicologica I no. 13 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1958). *León Tello, Francisco José. "Francisco de Salinas" ''Estudios de historia de teoría musical'' (Madrid: IEM, CSIC, 1962), pp. 539–642. *García Matos, Manuel, “Pervivencia en la tradición actual de canciones populares recogidas en el siglo XVI por Salinas en su tratado De musica libri septem,” ''Anuario Musical'', XVIII (Barcelona, 1963), 67–84. *"Salinas", in ''New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', (London: Macmillan, 1980). *Fernández de la Cuesta, Ismael, (transl.) ''Siete Libros sobre la Música. Primera versión castellana'' (Madrid: Editorial Alpuerto, 1983). *Garcia Fraile, Dámaso. “Salinas, catedrático de la Universidad de Salamanca,” in ''Livro de homenagem a Macario Santiago Kastner'' (Lisbon: Fund. Calouste Gulbenkian, 1992), pp. 431–62. *Otaola González, Paloma, “Francisco Salinas y la teoría modal en el siglo XVI,” ''Nassare,'' XI (1995), 367–85. *Alin, José Maria, "Francisco Salinas y la canción popular del siglo XVI," in P.M.PiNnero Ramírez, (coord.) ''Lírica popular, lírica tradicional: lecciones en homenaje a Don Emilio García Gómez (Seville: Univ. de Sevilla, 1998), I, págs. 137-58. *Otoala González, Paloma, “Las fuentes en el De musica libri septem de Francisco Salinas,” in M. de C. Gómez and M. Bernado (eds.), ''Fuentes musicales en la Peninsula Ibérica (ca. 1250-ca. 1550). Fonts musicals a la Peninsula Ibérica'' (Lerida: Inst. d’Estudis Ilerdencs, Univ. de Lerida, 2001), pp. 359-83. *Katz. Israel J. "Francisco de Salinas and 'Conde Claros fraile', in ''Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition. Carolingian Ballads (2): Conde Claros'' (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2008), pp. 293-379. *Rubio de la Iglesia, Fernando, "Las melodías populares en 'De Música libri septem' de Francisco de Salinas: Estudio comparado de algunos ejemplos," in A.S. García Pérez and P. Otaola González (coords.) ''Francisco de Salinas: Música, teoría y matemática en el Renacimiento'' (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 2014), pp. 219–53.


External links


Francisco de Salinas on the Huygens-Fokker Foundation site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Salinas, Francisco de 1513 births 1590 deaths People from Burgos Musicians from Castile and León Spanish musicians Spanish music theorists Spanish classical organists Male classical organists University of Salamanca alumni University of Salamanca faculty 16th-century musicians Renaissance composers Spanish classical composers Spanish male classical composers 16th-century Spanish people Blind classical musicians Blind people from Spain