Should (early) Baroque music be equally tempered? Vincenzo Galilei’s 1584Libro d’intavolatura di liutoand its wider implications for historical performance practice

Abstract

Vincenzo Galilei (late 1520s–1591), father of the famous astronomer Galileo and a prolific member of Giovanni de’ Bardi’s Florentine Camerata, was a seminal figure not only in the development of the late Renaissance lute style, but also in that of early Baroque music. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that his ground-breaking collection of solo lute music, entitled Libro d’intavolatura di liuto (1584), demonstrated the practical benefits of a ‘well-tempered’ tuning system 138 years before J. S. Bach’s Well-tempered clavier . Žak Ozmo argues that the organization of the collection is indicative of Galilei’s (and his contemporaries’) advocacy for equal temperament.