Vincenzo Galilei Research Articles

Dialogue on ancient and modern music

Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the astronomer Galileo, was a guiding light of the Florentine Camerata. His Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, published in 1581 or 1582 and now translated into English for the first time, was among the most influential music treatises of his era. Galilei is best known for his rejection of modern polyphonic music in favor of Greek monophonic song. The treatise sheds new light on his importance, both as a musician who advocated a new philosophy of music history and theory based on an objective search for the truth, and as an experimental scientist who was one of the founders of modern acoustics.

LA CRITICA DI VINCENZO GALILEI AL MISTICISMO NUMERICO DI GIOSEFFO ZARLINO

Abstracttitle SUMMARY /title The long and bitter dispute between Gioseffo Zarlino, the foremost musical theorist of the sixteenth century, and Vincenzo Galilei, practical musician and Galileo's father, raises important issues as it concerns the methodological approach towards musical phenomena. In particular, the present work shows that the true overthrowing of Zarlino's a priori approach (besides the relationship between music and words and other aspects of content) can be found in a new conception of numbers, namely the passage from numerical and theoretical mysticism (dating back to the Pythagorean approach) to an empirical methodology. The description of this new way to treat numbers (as instruments) is shown through an analysis of two of Vincenzo Galilei's manuscript essays: the Discorso particolare intorno alle forme del Diapason and the Discorso particolare intorno all'Unisono. The originality of these works lies in their presentation of factual experiments.

Maniates, Rika, ed. Musical Discourse from Classical to Early Modern Times: Editing and Translating Texts. Papers given at the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems University of Toronto, 19-20 October 1990. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. xii, 149 pp. ISBN 0-8020-0972-7 (hardcover)

Maniates, Rika, ed. Musical Discourse from Classical to Early Modern Times: Editing and Translating Texts. Papers given at the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems University of Toronto, 19-20 October 1990. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. xii, 149 pp. ISBN 0-8020-0972-7 (hardcover). The studies published in this collection were initially presented as papers at the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, held at the University of Toronto, and organized by Maria Rika Maniates, Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. It was the first time that this conference was devoted to musical questions, and the resulting volume constitutes a first-rate addition to a mere handful of excellent essay series publications on medieval and Renaissance music that have emerged within the last two decades.1 The essays are multidimensional in their content and interdisciplinary in nature and approach. They address both the obvious and subtle problems encountered by scholars in the course of editing and translating ancient, medieval and Renaissance treatises, the comprehensive study of which has always exceeded the expertise of any one field, and an accurate understanding of which with regard to the theoretical concepts themselves as well as to their transmission processes pose, among other queries, the intriguing question of contemporaneous and current author as translator or interpreter? Rika Maniates's introduction, which presents the contributors - who include musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and philosophers - and provides summaries of their presentations, is followed by five essays. The first essay (Fidelities and Infidelities in Translating Early Music Theory), by Claude V. Palisca, deals with problems of translation from the perspective of terminology, syntax, meaning, and style. With references to excerpts and terms from various treatises ranging broadly from Boethius's (ca. 480-524) De institutione musice to Vincenzo Galilei's Discorso intorno all'opere di messer Gioseffo Zarlino da Chioggia (1589), Palisca points out and explains the pitfalls of verbal equivalences and, I would add, equatables,in some cases, resulting from the lack of technical vocabulary available to earUer writers, but for which today there exists a terminology with specific designations. He argues against strict syntactical observance to the earlier texts, which may produce a modern translation that is archaic in its use of subjunctive and conditional moods, infrequently used in speech today, and sees no justification for perpetuating such grammatical constructions in modern-day translations. PaUsca further states that the translator may take certain liberties in the form of additions to or deletions from the original treatise for the sake of clarity, however, ensuring that the integrity of the original text is neither threatened nor violated in any way. By extension, if a translator is capable of conveying the original author's manner of thinking and speaking, then invariably, according to Palisca, that author's personality, and, therefore, his or her style wiU be captured and realized. To reinforce further his points of view, the author applies several aspects of the four criteria around which the discussions of his paper are centred to selected passages in Anonymous's His ita perspectis (ca. 1100),Tinctoris's Liber de arte contrapuncti (1477), and Zarlino's Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558), comparing his translations with other published translations. PaUsca raises excellent points in connection with the problems plaguing modern-day translators of early writings, although I believe the greatest drawback, even pitfall, of all is the fact that Latin is not a spoken vernacular today, making it difficult to capture the essence of the language. One should, therefore, be as equally wary of the practice implied by John Ciardi's term, translatorese - translating words rather than thoughts - as of the opposite end of that spectrum - translating thoughts rather than or regardless of the words. …

Some Aspects of the Musical Theory of Vincenzo Galilei and Galileo Galilei

In this paper I concentrate on two points which are, I hope, of interest not only to musicologists but also to historians of ideas in other fields. I deal mainly with the works of the two Galileis, but of course mention the views of other musical theorists, in particular of Zarlino, since a large part of Vincenzo Galilei's writings is directed against him. This brings me to the first of my two general points: that polemical writings often present to the historian peculiar difficulties of interpretation, especially when the two adversaries, on the one hand, genuinely hate each other, and, on the other, may in fact agree on the main subject under discussion. This was, I believe, the case in the controversy between Vincenzo Galilei and Zarlino, and the resultant dishonesty and evasion of crucial problems makes very tricky the task of disentangling their true thought.