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Year 1511 (MDXI) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.

Events[link]

January–June[link]

• April 9 – St John's College, Cambridge, England, founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort, receives its charter.

July–December[link]

• July – Henry VIII of England's flagship, the Mary Rose, is launched at Portsmouth.
• August 24 – Afonso de Albuquerque of Portugal conquers Malacca, the capital of the Sultanate of Malacca. The Sultanate then establishes rule from Johor, starting decades of skirmishes against the Portuguese to regain the fallen city. While taking the city, the Portuguese slaughter a large community of Chinese merchants living there (mentioned by Zhang Xie writing a century later). Malacca is the first city in Southeast Asia to be taken by a Western nation, gaining home rule only in 1957 when it becomes part of Malaysia.
• November – The Treaty of Westminster creates an alliance between Henry VIII of England and Ferdinand II of Aragon against France.
• November 20 – Sinking of the vessel Frol de la mar transporting Afonso de Albuquerque and the valuable treasure of the conquest of Malacca en route to Goa.

Date unknown[link]

• Diego Velázquez and Hernán Cortés conquer Cuba; Velázquez is appointed Governor.
• Duarte Barbosa arrives in India for the second time. He works as clerk in the factory of Cananor and as the liaison with the Indian rajah.
• Ferdinand II of Aragon observes that "one black can do the work of four Indians".
• Juan de Agramonte, a sailor from Spain, is thought possibly to have travelled to Newfoundland.
• Taíno, an indigenous uprising occurs in southwestern Puerto Rico near Guánica.
• The first black slaves arrive in Colombia.
• The Spanish conquest of Yucatán begins.
• Erasmus publishes his most famous work, The Praise of Folly, as Moriae encomium / Laus stultitiae.
• Şahkulu Rebellion

Births[link]

• January 1 – Henry, Duke of Cornwall, eldest son of Henry VIII of England
• June 18 – Bartolomeo Ammanati, Florentine architect and sculptor (d. 1592)
• July 9 – Dorothea of Saxe-Lauenburg, consort of Christian III from 1525 and Queen of Denmark and Norway (d. 1571)
• July 30 – Giorgio Vasari, Italian painter and architect (d. 1574)
• September 29 – Michael Servetus, Spanish theologian (d. 1553)
• October 22 – Erasmus Reinhold, German astronomer and mathematician (d. 1553)
• November 15 – Johannes Secundus, Dutch poet (d. 1536)
• date unknown
  • Amato Lusitano, Portuguese Jewish physician (d. 1568)
  • Kimotsuki Kanetsugu, Japanese samurai and warlord (d. 1566)
  • Luis de Velasco, Spanish viceroy of New Spain (d. 1564)
  • Nicola Vicentino, Italian music theorist and composer (d. 1576)
  • Nicholas Bobadilla, one of the first Jesuits (d. 1590)
  • Pierre Viret, Swiss reformed theologian (d. 1571)
  • Gaspar Cervantes de Gaeta, Spanish cardinal (d. 1575)

Deaths[link]

• February 11 – Henry, Duke of Cornwall, eldest son of Henry VIII of England
• August 2 – Andrew Barton, Scottish naval leader (b. c. 1466)
• September 6 – Ashikaga Yoshizumi, Japanese shogun (b. 1481)
• date unknown
  • Demetrius Chalcondyles, Greek classical scholar (b. 1424)
  • Diego de Nicuesa, Spanish conquistador and explorer
  • Johannes Tinctoris, Flemish composer and music theorist (b. c. 1435)
  • Philippe de Commines, French-speaking Fleming in the courts of Burgundy and France (b. 1447)
  • Matthias Ringmann, German cartographer and humanist poet (b. 1482)
• probable – Antoine de Févin, French composer (b. c. 1470)

References[link]

Vicentino

Nicola Vicentino (1511 – 1575 or 1576) was an Italian music theorist and composer of the Renaissance. He was one of the most visionary musicians of the age, inventing, among other things, a microtonal keyboard, and devising a practical system of chromatic writing two hundred years before the rise of equal temperament.

Life[link]

Little is known of his early life. Born in Vicenza, he may have studied with Adrian Willaert in Venice, which was close by, and he acquired an early interest in the contemporary humanistic revival, including the study of ancient Greek music theory and performance practice (about which little was known, but was then being uncovered, through the work of scholars such as Girolamo Mei and Giangiorgio Trissino).

At some time in the 1530s or early 1540s he went to Ferrara, which was to become the center for experimental secular music in Italy from the middle to the end of the 16th century. Apparently he served as a music tutor to the Duke of Este as well as some of his family members, and some of Vicentino's music was sung at the court of Ferrara.

During the late 1540s his reputation as a music theorist grew. He established his reputation as a composer with his publication of a book of madrigals in Venice in 1546, and in 1551 he took part in one of the most famous events in 16th century music theory, the debate between Vicente Lusitano and himself in Rome in 1551. The topic of the debate was the relationship of the ancient Greek genera to contemporary music practice, in particular whether contemporary music could be explained in terms of the diatonic genus alone (as Lusitano claimed) or (as Vicentino claimed) was best described as a combination of the diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic genera, the last of which contained a microtone. The debate was rather unlike those among contemporary musicologists, being more like a refereed prize fight, with a panel of judges; they awarded the prize to Lusitano. Unbowed, Vicentino continued his experiments, and went on to build the archicembalo which could play the music he described in his publications. Only one keyboard instrument using his 31-note-to-the-octave system survives from the Renaissance: the ‘Clavemusicum Omnitonum Modulis Diatonicis Cromaticis et Enearmonicis', built by Vito Trasuntino of Venice in 1606 to play the diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic. It is on display at the International museum and library of music in Bologna.

After a short time in Rome, Vicentino returned to Ferrara, and later moved to Siena. In 1563 he became maestro di cappella at Vicenza Cathedral, thus returning to his home city, but only briefly, for he accepted a position in Milan in 1565. Around 1570 he had some connection with the Bavarian court in Munich, though he may never have gone there. He died in Milan during the plague of 1575–1576, though his exact date of death is not known.

Works[link]

Cathedral of Ferrara. Ferrara was the principal center of chromatic experimentation in the second half of the 16th century.

While Vicentino was known as a composer, and wrote two books of madrigals and motets in a harmonically sophisticated style, it was his work as a music theorist that gained him renown.

In the 1550s, in Italy, there was a surge of interest in chromatic composition, some of which was part of the movement known as musica reservata, and some of which was motivated by research into ancient Greek music, including modes and genera. Composers such as Cipriano de Rore, Orlande de Lassus and others wrote music which was impossible to sing in tune without having a system for adjusting the pitch of chromatic intervals in some way. Several theorists attacked the problem, including Vicentino.

In 1555 he published his most famous work, L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (ancient music adapted to modern practice), in which he fully explained his ideas linking ancient Greek musical theory and practice with contemporary works. In this work he expanded and justified many of the ideas which he first brought up in his debate with Lusitano. Whether or not Lusitano ever attempted to refute Vicentino's expanded version is not known; however, Vicentino's book was influential with the group of madrigalists working in Ferrara in the next two decades, including Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Carlo Gesualdo.

Another area in which Vicentino did original work was musical dynamics. He was one of the first theorists, and perhaps the first, to mention volume as an expressive parameter. In L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica he mentioned that the strength of singing must respect carefully the text and passage being sung.

Vicentino's most famous invention was the archicembalo, a keyboard containing thirty-six keys to the octave. Using this keyboard, it was possible to play acoustically satisfactory intervals in any key, and therefore some of the recently composed music in a chromatic style, which was only in tune when sung, could be played on the keyboard. Later he applied the same keyboard layout to the archiorgano, a microtonal keyboard for the organ. While these keyboards did not achieve wide popularity, they did offer a way of playing music in meantone temperament in all keys. The standard way to modulate through all keys on a keyboard instrument later became to divide the octave into twelve equal parts, called 12-tone equal temperament, in which the major and minor thirds are not well tuned. Vicentino's solution in effect divides the octave into 31 equal parts, with good intonation for the thirds and sixths but somewhat beating narrow fifths.

Keyboard of the Archicembalo

References and further reading[link]

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
• Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4
• Edwin M. Ripin: "Arcicembalo", Henry W. Kaufmann/Robert L. Kendrick, "Nicola Vicentino," Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed January 8, 2005), Grove Music Online
• Vicentino, Nicola. (1555) L' antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica. Antonio Barre, Rome. (Gallica)
• Barbieri, Patrizio. Enharmonic instruments and music, 1470-1900. (2008) Latina, Il Levante Libreria Editrice
• Nicola Vicentino. Translated by Maria Rika Maniates. Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice
• The Arch-Musician. BBC Radio 3 programme broadcast Saturday 27 March 2010; rebroadcast Saturday 23 July 2011 [1]

External links[link]

• Free scores by Nicola Vicentino at the International Music Score Library Project
• Nicola Vicentino on LastFM