Fronimo de Vincenzo Galilei. By Philippe Canguilhem. pp. 235. Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance: Collection ‘Épitome musical’. (Minerve, Paris and Tours, 2001, €40. ISBN 2-86931-101-X.)

Abstract

Best known as a member of Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Florentine Camerata and a champion of ancient music, Vincenzo Galilei was principally a lutenist and a practical musician. This is one of the pervasive themes that shape Philippe Canguilhem’s recent study of Galilei’s Fronimo. Unlike his famous and polemical Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (1581), Fronimo is chiefly a practical book designed to teach lutenists how to intabulate vocal music, and to instruct them in many other aspects of music theory. It also contains a rich anthology of madrigals for performance and study. First published in Venice in 1568, Fronimo was reissued in a revised second edition in 1584. In this first monograph on Fronimo, Canguilhem demonstrates that the book provides a complete musical education for the lutenist and contends that it is comparable only to Zarlino’s Istitutioni harmoniche among the counterpoint treatises of the second half of the sixteenth century (p. 86). Undoubtedly one of the most substantial Renaissance lute treatises and the most detailed account of lute intabulation practice, Fronimo reflects the practices of the best lutenists and teachers of the period. Organized in six chapters, Canguilhem’s book explores Galilei’s professional life and musical development, the two editions of Fronimo and the repertory it contains, Galilei’s instructions on intabulating, the links between intabulations and fantasias, and the influence of the treatise. Canguilhem’s primary focus is on Galilei as lutenist and teacher, and even though Fronimo’s contributions to broader issues of music theory are not explored, the book adds a new dimension to the commonly projected image of Galilei and is a significant contribution to the study of the neglected field of sixteenth-century intabulations.