Reading the transcriptions

Jan Ling: It's the same thing as with a painting
- you don't make a new drawing of the Mona Lisa'

The main principle here has been to alter as little as possible, consistent with the need to make the pieces understandable and playable for practical musicians.

Experience has shown that this no longer means that one has to alter note-values, but that most people nowadays manage the original note-values

with little or no problem - and come much nearer the spirit of the music - provided a few basic ideas are first understood.

The sources for the following quotations are given in the literature list at the end: quotations from Gafori, Demantius, Beringer and Mersenne are translated by DK, those from Butler are transcribed from phonetic spelling.

basics | long-short | timenote=tactus | tactus=heartbeat | dimensio binaria | tripla white minims | tripla white semibreves | tripla black semibreves | rests | NB