Excellent compendium of musick

Descartes, René, 1596-1650 · 1653 · London : Printed by T. Harper, for Humphrey Moseley, and are to bee sold at his shop at the signe of the Princes Armes in S. Pauls Church-Yard, and by Thomas Heath in Coven Garden · 8 pictures

Excellent compendium of musick is a 1653 London music theory treatise by René Descartes, printed by T. Harper for Humphrey Moseley and aimed at students of musical acoustics and composition. Its pictures are dense diagrams: a ruled grid of solmization syllables and numbers, a columned table of letters and tallies, and staff notation set against a bass line, offering a designer dense rhythmic grids, tabular structure and rule-based patterning.

Music theory · Music -- Acoustics and physics

Internet Archive · Wellcome Library · Public domain (published before 1931) · More from this library