ABSTRACT
Bound with the Bodleian Library's copy of the pamphlet 'The Musicall Compass' appears a manuscript text with the title 'The Use of the Musical Canon'. This is an elusive text, but it bears an unmistakable relationship with Thomas Salmon's musical ideas, and seems to me best understood as a product of the period of work which also resulted in the Proposal of 1688. The text falls into three parts: the first discusses the construction and properties of the scale and the second the detailed placement of frets on a viol with a separate set of frets for each string, while the third provides that compromise sets of frets for various keynotes, in each of which a single set of frets governs all six strings. The evidence seems consistent with the possibility that this was the text on which Salmon was working, with John Wallis's advice and possibly his collaboration, at the time of their correspondence in the winter of 1685-6.
