Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume II

338 to be duly reimbursed. The bearer of the present letter will perhaps do me the favour of bringing it to me with Your Reverence’s grace, and the recommendation made to him for this purpose by Signor Don Antonio Vandini, who cordially reveres you. But please remember that it must be by the maker Fioresi, and not by another one. I bow down to Your Reverence, as to the Most Illustrious Signor Dottor Balbi, and I heartily remain Your Reverence’s most humble, devoted and obliged servant Giuseppe Tartini Padua, 20 October 1751 83. Tartini to G.B. Martini I thank Your Reverence as much as I know and can for the most evident sign given to me of your heartfelt care in the examination of my treatise. May there well be between us the express pact to proceed with all due rigour in the present matter, and I, who examine the treatise daily, shall be the first if I find some mistake therein to inform you thereof. And if there is none, I must be allowed and compelled to explain myself with full liberty. In the notice given to me by Your Reverence, please reflect that I only declare myself the defender and discoverer of the third sound coming from two strings played on any bowed instrument; on that alone is my entire treatise focused, and this is the only discovery which I call my own, because it is. If I then make myself the author of nothing more, it seems to me that the comment made to me is not pertinent. Even more so because Your Reverence cannot deny that the phenomenon of the string such as Ut, that produces two other high sounds, one at the 12th, as Sol, the other at the 17th, as Mi, is known to me. Thirty lines roughly before the first proposition of my treatise, you must have read these exact words of mine: it is a thing of marvel, that having observed the three sounds that are heard in just one taut string on the monochord, that is to say 1, 1/3, 1/5, it has not been inferred that the unit is in itself by nature harmonic, when 1, 1/3, 1/5 is a harmonic progression, etc., so not only was the phenomenon known to me, and not only do I admit it to be someone else’s discovery, and commonly known, but furthermore, in the quoted passage, I bring it up, together with the other harmonic phenomena commonly known to learned men, because said phenomena being known to them, they have not deduced that the unit is harmonic in itself, and that the harmonic progression in any respect reduces the different to the one, and to the same, etc. I do not doubt that Your Reverence knows that just as it is in music, with low Ut, high Sol at the 12th and Mi