Background
Vincenzio Galilei was born in Monte, Italy in 1520. He was of a Florentine patrician family originally surnamed Bonajuti, renamed in the fourteenth century. He was the son of Michelangelo Galilei and Maddalena di Bergo.
Italy
Vincenzio Galilei
Italy
Vincenzio Galilei
https://www.amazon.it/Dialogo-della-musica-antica-moderna/dp/B00G3DIY6K
1581
composer music theorist musician
Vincenzio Galilei was born in Monte, Italy in 1520. He was of a Florentine patrician family originally surnamed Bonajuti, renamed in the fourteenth century. He was the son of Michelangelo Galilei and Maddalena di Bergo.
Galilei began the study of music at Florence about 1540. After establishing his reputation as a lutenist, he studied at Venice under Gioseffo Zarlino, the foremost music theorist of the time, probably about 1561-1562.
Through correspondence with Girolamo Mei at Rome during the 1570’s, Galilei became interested in ancient Greek music and was encouraged to put to the direct experimental test the teachings of Zarlino concerning intonation and tuning. The result was a bitter polemic with Zarlino, who in 1580-1581 appears to have used his influence to oppose the publication of Galilei’s principal theoretical work at Venice and its sale there after it was printed at Florence.
Galilei’s Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna attacked the prevailing basis of musical theory. Zarlino defended his system based on the number six in his Sopplementi musicali, published at Venice in 1588. His former pupil Galilei was a principal target of attack in this book, although Zarlino did not name him and although Bernardino Baldi, in a short biography of Zarlino, wrongly identified the adversary as Francisco de Salinas. Galilei replied with a spirited polemic, the Discorso, published in 1589. Galilei employed this experimental result to show that the traditional association of numbers with particular musical intervals was capricious. The musical qualities of intervals had to be determined by the ear, he argued, and mathematics had no authority where the senses were concerned.
Galilei composed two books of madrigals, as well as music for lute, and a considerable quantity of music for voice and lute. This latter category is considered to be his most important contribution as it anticipated in many ways the style of the early Baroque.
Vincenzio Galilei was a seminal figure in the musical life of the late Renaissance and contributed significantly to the musical revolution which demarcates the beginning of the Baroque era. In his study of pitch and string tension, Galilei produced perhaps the first non-linear mathematical description of a natural phenomenon known to history. It was an extension of a Pythagorean tradition but went beyond it. He was also one of the inventors of monody, the musical style closest to recitative.
The prevailing basis of musical theory was rooted in the Pythagorean doctrine that the cause of consonance lay in the existence of the “sonorous numbers,” two, three, and four, which in their ratios with one another and with unity were considered to produce the only true consonances. A modified tuning given by Ptolemy (the syntonic diatonic) was favored by Zarlino, who rationalized this tuning by extending the sonorous numbers to six. Galilei observed that musical practice did not conform to this numerical system based on superparticular ratios, which, expressed as fractions have numerators exceeding their denominators by unity. He declared that neither the authority of ancient writers nor speculative number theories could be valid against the evidence of the musician’s ear. Although he recommended placing frets on lute and violin the ratio 18:17, he recognized this as merely approximate in obtaining an equally tempered scale suitable for unrestricted modulation, in the direction of which musical practice was rapidly moving.
Galilei was also interested in the attempts to revive ancient Greek music and drama, by way of his association with the Florentine Camerata, a group of poets, musicians and intellectuals led by Count Giovanni de' Bardi, as well as his contacts with Girolamo Mei, the foremost scholar of the time of ancient Greek music. In his Dialogo he attacked the practice of composition in which four or five voices sing different melodic lines simultaneously with different rhythms, thus obscuring the text and ignoring the natural rhythm of the words. The use of recitative in opera is widely attributed to Galilei, since he was one of the inventors of monody, the musical style closest to recitative.
On 5 July 1562 Galilei married Giulia Ammannati of Pescia and settled near Pisa. Galileo Galilei was the eldest of their seven children.
