On 1 June 1581, in Florence, Vincenzo Galilei signed the dedication of a book that had almost failed to appear. He addressed it to his patron, Count Giovanni Bardi of Vernio, and put into it an outburst that no publisher today would let through. He had handed the manuscript to certain printers in Venice the previous October; they had kept it for months, perhaps to oblige someone who out of envy wanted to prevent its publication, and in the end had all but denied him the original. Before getting it back, Galilei writes, he had already had two thirds of it printed in Florence from a draft left in his house. The Florentine printer was Giorgio Marescotti. The title: Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music).
The man who signed it was about sixty, born around 1520 at Santa Maria a Monte, in the Valdarno, a professional lutenist with a seventeen-year-old son called Galileo. In Venice, in the 1560s, he had been a pupil of Gioseffo Zarlino, the century’s greatest music theorist. The Dialogo was written against him. The interlocutors are Bardi himself and Piero Strozzi, and the thesis, repeated for a hundred and fifty pages, is that the polyphony of the moderns, with its interwoven voices stealing words from one another, no longer moves anyone, while the music of the ancients, a single voice saying a text, made people weep and rage. In Bardi’s salons that thesis already had a name, the Camerata, and within twenty years it would give birth to opera.
The book’s most precious piece, however, is on page 97, and it is not an argument. It is a document. There Galilei prints, with the original signs above the Greek syllables, the hymns that philology attributes to Mesomedes of Crete, poet and musician at the court of the emperor Hadrian: to the Muse, to the Sun, to Nemesis. On the preceding page he tells where they came from. A Florentine gentleman had found them in Rome, in the library of the Cardinal of Sant’Angelo, in some leaves bound at the end of a very ancient codex containing the treatises of Aristides Quintilianus and Bryennius, and had sent them to him faithfully copied. The gentleman was Girolamo Mei, the philologist who had been explaining to him by letter for years what Greek music really was. Galilei calls them ancient chants and makes a gift of them to his readers.
He does not transcribe them. Beneath the hymns he warns only that if anyone renders those signs according to modern practice and finds strange notes or movements out of the ordinary, he must blame time and the scant diligence of the copyists. In the book he also prints the tables of Alypius, the ancient theorist who had listed the symbols of Greek notation: the key to read them, delivered together with the lock. For the first time a European reader could hold in hand music written by the Greeks. Playing it was another matter. Those who had looked to antiquity for a model to imitate found themselves facing mute melodies, and had to invent for themselves the song they claimed to restore.
The Dialogo also contains a method, and here the book looks ahead by half a century. Galilei did not trust the numbers Zarlino inherited from the Pythagoreans. He wanted proof from the ear and the hand. In the following years, spurred by Mei, he hung weights from strings of equal length and found that to obtain the octave a double weight was not enough, a quadruple one was needed, and that the fifth, a ratio of three to two in length, called for weights in the ratio of nine to four. He published it in 1589 in the Discorso intorno all’opere di messer Gioseffo Zarlino, again from Marescotti. His son, meanwhile, had begun teaching mathematics at Pisa.
Vincenzo Galilei died in Florence and was buried on 2 July 1591. In 1638 Galileo published in Leiden the Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze (Two New Sciences), and in the first day he returned to stretched strings, weights and consonances.