1520–1591 · Baroque
Vincenzo Galilei (1520 to 1591) was a lutenist, composer and writer on music from Italy. He took part in the work of the Florentine Camerata, wrote the dialogue Fronimo, a school of lute playing, and was the father of Galileo Galilei. For performers he left dance pieces, among them a saltarello.
The birthplace of Vincenzo Galilei was Santa Maria a Monte, and the year was 1520. He began learning the lute very young. The future musician's mother came from San Vincenzo, near Livorno.
Before 1562 he moved to Pisa and married Giulia Ammannati, who came from a noble family. The eldest of the six or seven children was Galileo Galilei, the future physicist and astronomer. Another son, Michelagnolo, was born in 1575 and grew into a lutenist and composer.
Galilei played the lute well and won the interest of powerful patrons early. Giovanni Bardi noticed the musician's talent and around 1563 paid for his studies in Venice. There Galilei became a pupil of Gioseffo Zarlino, who is described as the foremost music theorist of the 16th century.
In 1568 the dialogue Fronimo came out in Venice. It is regarded as the first complete school of lute playing. Galilei later reworked the book, and the second version appeared in the same city in 1584.
Galilei valued the lute highly and thought it preferable to the organ. He was convinced that the lute could convey a great variety of shades of feeling: hardness and softness, bitterness and sweetness, and also weeping and lament.
Later Galilei became interested in efforts to bring back the music and theatre of ancient Greece. His part in the Florentine Camerata, a circle headed by Count Giovanni Bardi that brought together poets, musicians and thinkers, was connected with this. He was one of the active participants of the Camerata.
A decisive influence on his views came from Girolamo Mei, the leading scholar of ancient Greek music at the time. After this, Galilei's attitude to the works of his teacher Zarlino changed sharply. Together with other members of the Camerata he helped lay the foundations of opera.
Opera's recitative is often traced back to Galilei, who numbered among the creators of monody, the manner of writing nearest to it.
Around 1572 Galilei wrote the treatise Compendio nella theorica della musica, which remained in manuscript. In it he concluded that ancient music and the Italian music of his own day were incompatible, and that attempts to reconstruct antiquity were futile.
In 1581 the Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna was published in Florence. Criticising his teacher in it, Galilei developed the same ideas. In 1589 the Discorso on the works of Gioseffo Zarlino also appeared in Florence.
The central idea of his aesthetics was that modern music had lost the power over the feelings that belonged to antiquity. He sharply and ironically criticised the vocal music of his contemporaries for excessive imitation of the words. In his view traditional imitative counterpoint makes music harder to take in, so he defended melody as the main musical idea and the basis of the texture.
Galilei studied acoustics. He carried out physical experiments and, apparently for the first time in history, showed that for two identical strings to give a certain interval, the masses of the suspended weights must be in the square of the ratio of that interval. Before that it had been thought otherwise, including in the textbook of Boethius.
For a perfect fifth, for example, the string lengths stand in the ratio 3:2, while weights on strings of equal length must be in the ratio 9:4. His son Galileo helped him in these experiments.
Galilei promoted equal temperament. In tuning the lute he proposed dividing the octave into equal semitones in the ratio 18:17. That figure, though only roughly calculated, comes very close to the semitone of equal temperament.
Late in life Galilei wrote treatises on harmony and counterpoint, on dissonance, and on the enharmonic and chromatic genera. Many of them remained in manuscript and were not printed in his lifetime. He is counted among those who prepared the music of the modern era with its homophonic style.
Vincenzo Galilei died in Florence in July 1591. He is buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce.
Galilei left two books of madrigals, published in 1574 and 1587, and a good deal of music for the lute. The pieces for voice with lute are considered an especially important part of his legacy, since in many ways they anticipated the style of the early Baroque. All of Galilei's surviving compositions belong to the polyphonic style.
The lute Book of Tablature of 1584 contains an experimental suite of 24 micro-cycles. Each one joins three dances: a passamezzo, a romanesca and a saltarello. The cycles run through all 12 keys, that is, on 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. Galilei wrote it while exploring tuning and keys.
The site has one edition of his music: Saltarello for solo guitar, at the intermediate-plus level.