Vincenzo Galilei

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Della musica antica et della moderna , 1581

Vincenzo Galilei , also Vincenzio Galilei, (* around 1520 in Santa Maria a Monte , † July 2, 1591 in Florence ) was an Italian lutenist , music theorist and composer . He is the father of the great natural scientist Galileo Galilei and the composer Michelangelo Galilei .

Life

Vincenzo Galilei came from a noble family, which, however, did not include prosperity, but only the right to hold offices in Florence. He was a student of the music theorists Gioseffo Zarlino (in Venice in the 1560s) and Girolamo Mei . Around 1560 he moved to Pisa and in 1562 married Giulia Ammannati (died 1620) from a respected family of cloth merchants from Pisa, who throughout their life were known to be quarrelsome and difficult in character, even among their sons. Vincenzo Galilei also worked temporarily in the cloth trade in Pisa. The marriage resulted in six or seven children, including Galileo as the eldest son in 1564 and the lutenist and composer Michelagnolo in 1575 and three girls Virginia, Livia, Elena. He worked in Pisa, which belonged to the Duchy of Tuscany, and Florence as a lute teacher, lutenist, composer and singer and had important patrons, in particular Giovanni de Bardi in Florence, who also financed his stay in Venice with Zarlino. He was also in Rome for some time collecting madrigals. He was so obsessed with the lute that he played it at every opportunity, wandering through the city, on horseback, at the window or in bed , as it was called in his collection of lute compositions ( Fronimo , 1568, 2nd edition, 1584 ). At the beginning of the 1570s he was finally able to move to Florence, the capital of Tuscany, and devote himself entirely to music. In Florence he was a member of the Florentine Camerata of Giovanni de 'Bardi , a group that had set itself the goal of reviving ancient models. There he was also considered the theoretician of the group.

In 1578/79 he was in Munich at the court of Albrecht V. His son Michelangelo was court musician there.

In his 1581 work, Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna, dedicated to de 'Bardi , he showed himself to be the first representative of an Aristoxenos renaissance, since he took the view that the lute should be equally tempered; He gave the string proportion 18:17 as a very good approximation of the equally tempered semitone . In the same script, he advocated a revival of ancient monody (unanimity) and opposed conventional polyphony . He did this in a modified way, in such a way that he propagated solo singing with instrumental accompaniment. His writing became groundbreaking for the development of the recitative . He himself composed the first monodic works with lute accompaniment, but these have not been preserved. However, he has preserved some polyphonic madrigals and lute pieces.

In his pamphlet Discorso intorno all'opere di messer Gioseffo Zarlino ("Treatise on the works of Mr. Gioseffo Zarlino") he refuted, among other things, the assumption of his teacher Zarlino that his tradition of the legend of Pythagoras in the forge was physically correct there the pitch of a string is obviously not proportional to the tension. Galileo refuted the then common view that the ratio of the string tension of strings that are an octave apart in tuning was 2: 1, as with the length. Rather, by attaching weights, he showed that it was 4: 1 (see also string vibration ). Vincenzo Galilei did not publish many of the experimental investigations, but they were later found in the estate of his son Galileo Galilei. The quantitative description of the physical conditions on vibrating strings was then examined more closely in the 17th century by Galileo Galilei and Marin Mersenne (who was one of the early followers of Galileo's methods in France). The connection between theory and experiment in the field of music established by his father had an impact on Galileo's development as a physicist; it has also been assumed ( Stillman Drake ) that the young Galileo supported his father in the experiments when he was at the end of the 1580s still lived with his family. Drake also suspects that in these experiments his father (or with his father) the origin of the experimental method lay with Galileo, for example he attributes Galileo's early interest in the pendulum clock to it. Galileo Galilei received musical training from his father and played the lute.

Publications, text editions and translations

  • Intavolatura de lauto di Vincenzo Galileo Fiorentino. Rome 1563 (madrigals).
  • Fronimo ... Dialogo del intavolare nel musica del liuto , Venice 1568, 2nd edition 1584, Facsimile Bologna 1969
  • Discorso intorno all'opere di messer Gioseffo Zarlino da Chioggia , Venice 1589, facsimile reprint Milan 1933.
  • Dialogo della musica antica et moderna , ed. Fabio Fano, Reale Accademia d'Italia, Rome 1934, based on the Florence 1581 edition, ( digitized, Bavarian State Library )
    • Excerpts in English translation in O. Strunk (Ed.), Source Readings in Music History, Volume 2, The Renaissance Era, New York 1950, 1965
    • English translation with introduction: Dialogue on ancient and modern music , ed. Claude V. Palisca, Yale University Press, New Haven 2003, ISBN 0-300-09045-5
  • F. Rempp (Ed.): The counterpoint tracts by Vincenzo Galileis , Cologne 1980 (including Discorso intorno all`uso della dissonanze )
  • Discourse concerning the diversity of the ratios of the Diapason , in Claudio Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations , New Haven / London 1988 (reprinted is also A special discourse concerning the Unison )

His unpublished manuscripts are in the National Library of Florence (MSS Galileiani).

literature

  • Raoul Meloncelli:  Galileo, Vincenzio. In: Fiorella Bartoccini (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 51:  Gabbiani-Gamba. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1998, pp. 486-489.
  • Claude Palisca: V. Galilei , in: F. Blume (Ed.), The Music in Past and Present, Volume 4, Kassel, Basel 1955, column 1903 to 1905 (with bibliography until 1950)
  • C. Palisca: Vincenzo Galilei's Counterpoint treatise: a code for the seconda pratica , Journal of the American Musicological Society, Volume 9, 1956, pp. 81-96
  • C. Palisca: Scientific empiricism in musical thought , in: HH Rhys (ed.), Seventeenth century science and the arts, Princeton 1961, pp. 91-137
  • Claude V. Palisca, article Vincenzo Galilei. In: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , Volume VII, p. 96 (with list of publications).
  • C. Palisca: Vincenzo Galilei's arrangements for voice and lute , in: G. Reese, RJ Snow (Ed.), Essays in Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac, Pittsburgh 1969, pp. 207-232
  • C. Palisca: Humanism in Renaissance Musical Thought , New Haven / London 1985 (with translations from among others the Dialogo of Galilei)
  • Victor Coelho (Ed.): Music and Science in the Age of Galileo. Kluwer, Dordrecht 1992, ISBN 0-7923-2028-X .
  • Stillman Drake: Renaissance Music and Experimental Science . In: Journal of the History of Ideas. Volume 31, 1970, pp. 483-500.
  • Stillman Drake: Vincenzo Galilei and Galileo , in: Galileo Studies, Ann Arbor 1970, pp. 43-62

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John L. Heilbron: Galileo. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-958352-2 , p. 2 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  2. ↑ Claude Palisca: Was Galilei's father an experimental scientist?, In Victor Coelho (ed.), Music and science in the age of Galileo, Springer 1992, pp. 143–152
  3. ^ Stillman Drake: Renaissance Science and Music. In: J. of the history of ideas. Volume 31, 1970, p. 499.
  4. ↑ Not among his writings in Dict. Sci. Biogr. Listed
personal data
SURNAME Galileo, Vincenzo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Galileo, Vicentio; Galileo, Vincenzio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian lutenist, musicologist and composer
DATE OF BIRTH around 1520
PLACE OF BIRTH Santa Maria a Monte
DATE OF DEATH July 2, 1591
Place of death Florence