[Rarebooks] fa: ALEXANDER MALCOLM'S TREATISE OF MUSICK - 1721 (First major Scottish work on the subject)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, May 22. More details and images can  
be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name  
arch_in_la.

http://shop.ebay.com/arch_in_la/m.html?_trksid=p4340.l2562

Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Alexander Malcolm: A Treatise of Musick, Speculative, Practical, and  
Historical. Edinburgh: Printed for the Author, MDCCXXI [1721]. FIRST  
EDITION. Thick 8vo in full period calf with modern leather spine label  
stamped in gilt; xxiii, [1], 608 p.; with 8 folding (holograph)  
plates. ESTC  T100644.
There are several tidy ink corrections in an early hand with one  
instance of a long marginal annotation so elegantly and neatly written  
that we at first mistook it for a printed marginal note.  
Interestingly, while there are no other indications that Malcolm ever  
came in contact with this particular copy of his book, this long,  
meticulous annotation has the ring of an author correcting himself.  
Drawing an asterisk by the word "consequently" in the printed text,  
the annotator writes: "Consequently, &c. a wrong conclusion has here  
Escaped me, Viz That since the Chord passes the point O, Therefore it  
is Accellerated. I own the only thing that follows from passing that  
point is the Chord in every D (of a single Vibration) has more force  
than would retain it their[sic]; And the true Reason of Acceleration  
is this, Viz..." etc., etc.

The eight folding musical plates bound in at the rear have scattered  
soiling and offsetting; the first plate (see photo below) shows the  
most soiling and is partially torn off at the fold, but the diagrams  
appear to be complete, so what is lost was probably mostly margin. The  
second plate, "A Universal Table of the Signatures of Clefs," is  
followed by five folding plates with musical exercises on both sides  
(see photo above), and one plate of blank staffs. It was only while  
comparing them against the engraved plates in an online digital  
reproduction of the 1721 edition (ECCO) that we discovered what is  
most remarkable about the engraved plates in our copy — namely, that  
they're not engraved plates at all, but extraordinarily precise, near- 
exact holograph copies of the original engravings, executed in pen-and- 
ink by an early/contemporary hand, presumably the same meticulous hand  
that inscribed the aforementioned marginalia —and just possibly  
(albeit remotely) the hand of the author himself. In any case, they  
make for an unusual copy indeed of an important and uncommon work,  
"the first important treatise on the theory of music issued in  
Scotland," in which the concept of "just intonation and the necessity  
for establishing equal temperament were explained a year before the  
appearance of Bach's 'Well-Tempered Clavier'" (Grove's Dictionary).  
Sir John Hawkins described the work as ""one of the most valuable  
treatises on the subject of theoretical and practical music to be  
found in any of the modern languages."