Vincenzo Galilei (1 gen 1520 anni – 1 gen 1591 anni)

Descrizione:

Galileo's father, and a lutenist-singer, the best-trained musician in Girolamo Mei's inner circle.

Galilei convinced Mei that the ars perfecta, far from being the ultimate perfection of music, was a deviation from the true purpose of music as practiced by the ancients. The only way of restoring to music the ethical and expressive poewrs of which the ancients wrote would be to strip away the purely sensuous adornments of counterpoint and return to an art truly founded on the imitation of nature. Galilei cast his inflammatory thesis into the suitably Platonic form of a dialogue: the Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna, published in 1581...


What appealed to Galilei was a true "stile rappresentativeo": a "representational style." Of course,, the madrigalists were also interested in re-creating speech. We have already observed some pretty accurate imitation of speech in the middle section of Cipriano de Rore's "Da le belle contrade d'oriente". But even in the most rigorously representational polyphonic setting, there is a contradiction between the singleness of the expressive poetic text and the multiplicity of actual singing voices. The solution Galilei proposed was a return not to literal monophony but to what he called monodia, or "monody"--namely, a single voice accompanied by the lute, which he compared to Apollo's lyre from Greek mythology. In this way, expressive harmony could be retained without violating the demands of representation. This new vocal style was inspired by actual, enacted, enunciated speech rather than from the formal arrangements of verse.

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: