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Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695)


Christiaan Huygens described the 31-tone system in his Lettre touchant le cycle harmonique (Rotterdam 1691) and in Novus cyclus harmonicus (Leiden 1724). Earlier in 1661 he had already made notes in which he accomplished the following:

Huygens portrait Engraving by Frederik Ottens based on the portrait of Edelinck for the publication by 's-Gravesande of the Opera varia (1724)

Huygens portrait
Engraving by Gerard Edelinck (1687)

Huygens' name is invariably associated with the division of the octave into 31 equal parts. He was not the first one however to describe the 31-tone octave division. A similar division is implicit in the works of authors such as Nicola Vicentino (1555) and Fabio Colonna (1618), while several 17th-century 31-tone keyboards were built, all following more or less the design of Vicentino's archicembalo. The first explicit description of the 31-tone scale, together with string lengths, is in Lemme Rossi's Sistema musico (1666). Huygens didn't know about any of these writings and instruments; he only knew of the existence of Vicentino's archicembalo via Salinas. However, it was not his intention to provide a system with 31 tones available per octave but his main thesis was merely that meantone tuning - the traditional tuning system - could be described by a selection from the 31-tone scale, in his eyes a much nicer and more general way to describe pitches than the original meantone tuning.

division of a
whole tone in 5 parts by Colonna
Division of the whole tone VT (= C) - Re (= D) in five steps according to Colonna (1618)

See also the page about Huygens' contemporary Quirinus van Blankenburg (1654-1739).
Huygens has also corresponded with Joan Albert Ban (1597/8-1644).

Biographies of Huygens

On the web

In print

Publications of his work

Article on this website

"Lettre touchant le cycle harmonique", Histoire des Ouvrages des S�avans, October 1691, Rotterdam, pp. 78-88.

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