Vincenzo Galilei, Dialogo della Musica Antica et della Moderna (Florence, 1581)
From childhood, Galileo’s world was shaped by music. His father, Vincenzo Galilei, was a prominent music theorist who contributed to the development of Italian opera. This book, Vincenzo’s major work, was acquired in Fall 2014 with generous assistance from the Athletics Department.
Both Vincenzo and Galileo played the lute. Vincenzo’s compositions for the lute were widely appreciated, and as a young man Galileo gave lectures on the acoustics of the lute.
Vincenzo undertook a comprehensive program of experimental testing to determine the effects of string length, tension or thickness upon pitch. As a result, Vincenzo critiqued purely numeric tuning schemes in favor of acoustical and empirical methods.
Vincenzo, like his son Galileo, rejected authority in favor of an emphasis on experimental methods of discovery, and communicated research results in an engaging literary genre. In Galileo’s own Dialogo, the character named Sagredo repeats some of Vincenzo’s arguments, while the character named Salviati adds Galileo’s further reflections upon the weight of strings and frequency of vibrational motion. Together, father and son transformed music from a study of numerical relations in an ideal world to an empirical study in the physical world which incorporated acoustics and accommodated fretted instruments.
This copy once belonged to the French collector Jean Ballesdens (1595-1675), and contains manuscript corrections and musical annotations.
During Galileo’s World, Eugene Enrico, OU Ruth Verne Davis Reaugh Professor of Music, conducted a performance of Vincenzo’s music by the classical ensemble Accademia Filarmonica.
