(b S Maria a Monte, probably late 1520s; d Florence, bur. 2 July 1591). Italian theorist and composer. A pupil of Zarlino in Venice, he lived in Padua and from 1572 in Florence. With Giovanni de′ Bardi among his patrons, he became a leading member of the Camerata; through his published writings (notably Dialogo, 1581) he advocated the revival through monody of the ancient Greek union of poetry and music. His output includes madrigals, lute pieces and an important treatise on lute playing (Fronimo, 1568).
Galilei, Vincenzo (vēnchĕn'tsō gälēlĕ'ē), d. 1591, Italian lutenist, singer, writer, and composer; father of Galileo. As a member of the Florentine camerata (see opera), he was one of the first to compose recitatives. Thoroughly trained in the contrapuntal tradition of the Renaissance, he wrote the first literary treatise attacking counterpoint and advocating monody, Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna (1581).
Born: ca. 1525 -1529 in Santa Maria a Monte, Tuscany
Died: July 02, 1591 in Florence, Italy
Biography
Vincenzo Galilei was a Renaissance-era Italian composer and music theorist known for his efforts to restore a working balance between music and poetry via single-line vocal music. While he did write polyphonic works, he tended to favor music for one singer, accompaniment often being given by the lute.
Some sources give Florence as Galilei's place of birth, but the greater evidence suggests it was Santa Maria a Monte in Tuscany. It appears, too, that he was born in the late 1520s, perhaps as late as 1530, not around 1520, as older reference sources claim.
Little is known of Galilei's early years, but he likely sang in church choirs as a boy and must also have taken instruction on the lute from competent teachers since, by his early adult years, he had developed a reputation as an accomplished lutenist. Galilei was married in 1562, and, courtesy of patron Giovanni de' Bardi, began music studies in Venice with Gioseffo Zarlino, probably during the following year. In 1564 Galilei's wife gave birth to their first child, Galileo, who would become the famous astronomer.
In 1568 Galilei turned out his first important theoretical treatise, "Fronimo." About two years later he produced some song arrangements with lute accompaniment, which he fashioned for his own performance purposes -- he was also a fine bass singer.
In 1578, Galilei, now a resident in Florence with his family for about six years, began a discourse with his former teacher Zarlino regarding various musical subjects but primarily dealing with modes and tuning. Galilei's ideas, which finally took shape in the 1581 volume Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna, were more sound and progressive in outlook than those of Zarlino, who took offense to them.
In 1584 Galilei produced a book of lute compositions that contained 24 groups of dances. The collection represents one example from his substantial output demonstrating his preference for the major and minor keys over the church modes. Four years later he began work on an important two-part treatise on counterpoint, which he finished in 1589 and later revised.
He produced further theoretical treatises in his last years and presumably continued composing. Many of his musical and theoretical works have not survived. Galilei probably died in late June 1591. His burial took place that year on July 2 in Florence. ~ Robert Cummings, All Music Guide
Vincenzo Galilei (c. 1520 – 2 July 1591) was an Italianlutenist, composer, and music theorist, and the father of the famous astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei. He 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.
He was born around 1520 in Santa Maria a Monte (Tuscany), and began studying the lute at an early age. Sometime before 1562 he moved to Pisa, where he married into a noble family. In 1564 Galileo was born, the first of his either six or seven children; another son, Michelangelo, born in 1575, also turned out to be an accomplished lutenist.
Vincenzo was a skilled player of the lute, and early in life attracted the attention of powerful, well-connected patrons. In 1563 he met Gioseffo Zarlino, the most important music theorist of the sixteenth century, in Venice, and began studying with him. Somewhat later he became 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. Sometime in the 1570s his interests in music theory, as well as his composition, began to move in this direction. Some of Galilei's most important theoretical contributions involve the treatment of dissonance: he had a largely modern conception, allowing passing dissonance "if the voices flow smoothly" as well as on-the-beat dissonance, such as suspensions, which he called "essential dissonance." This describes Baroque practice, especially as he defines rules for resolution of suspensions by a preliminary leap away followed by a return to the expected note of resolution.
In addition, towards the end of his life he made some substantial discoveries in acoustics, particularly involving the physics of vibrating strings and columns of air. He discovered that while the ratio of an interval is proportional to string lengths – for example, a perfect fifth has the proportions of 3:2 – it varied with the square root of the tension applied (and the cube root of concave volumes of air). In the case of strings tuned in a perfect fifth, weights suspended from them needed to be in a ratio of 9:4 to produce the 3:2 perfect fifth.[1]
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.
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. Many scholars credit him with directing the activity of his son away from pure, abstract mathematics and towards experimentation using mathematical quantitative description of the results – a direction which was of utmost importance for the history of science.
Article Vincenzo Galilei, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
The Concise Edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed. Revised by Nicolas Slonimsky. New York, Schirmer Books, 1993. ISBN 0-02-872416-X
