Fronimo de Vincenzo Galilei (review)

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.

Surprisingly little is known about Galilei's life. Canguilhem's biographical sketch adds little new factual material. It is nonetheless enlightening because of the way he integrates Galilei's writings into his biography and through his consideration of some small and previously ignored clues. In trying to shed light on the decade that Galilei spent in Pisa (1562–71), the period of Fronimo's gestation and before his definitive move to Florence, Canguilhem teases out the identity of the author of one of Fronimo's dedicatory sonnets, Gasparo Torello, a lecturer in law at the University of Pisa, and suggests Galilei's likely association with the Pisan academic milieu during these years. This, he argues, may have been as influential on Galilei's intellectual development as his later study in Venice with Zarlino. Even the names of the two characters of Fronimo's didactic dialogue, Fronimo (practical wisdom) and Eumatius (he who learns easily), may have derived from conversations with Pisan humanists. Canguilhem portrays Galilei as no ordinary lutenist, but also a singer, composer, and pedagogue, an enlightened musician at the intersection of theory, practice, and pedagogy. Adulation does not preclude criticism, however, and Galilei's flaws and limitations are also discussed. It is suggested that his inability to gain court employment as a lutenist, singer, or composer may indicate modest abilities as a performer. His lack of success in the public sphere may well account for the frequent acidity of Galilei's pen, and Canguilhem sides with Palisca, Pirrotta, and D. P. Walker who also concluded that Galilei may not have been the most simpatico of souls.

Galilei's instructions on lute intabulation are synthesized in the fifty pages of Canguilhem's second chapter. The text of Fronimo is carefully examined, and Galilei's principles and practice are compared with contemporary sources to situate the treatise within the broader frame of Renaissance performance practice. Canguilhem underlines the role of the lute as a tool for learning the finer points of contrapuntal composition, the advantages accruing from being able to play vocal polyphony on a solo instrument, and the nexus between what has been separated by modern musicology into artificially distinct instrumental and vocal traditions. Galilei was concerned that intabulators should aim above all to...