Music and the Book of Nature: Vincenzo Galilei on the Conundrum of Musical Consonance

Abstract

FEW FIGURES HAVE DRAWN more scholarly attention to the relationship between Renaissance musical humanism and early modern science than Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1520/30–1591)—lutenist, composer, notorious polemicist in musical affairs, and the father of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), notorious polemicist in scientific affairs. Vincenzo has been conventionally portrayed as delivering a decisive conclusion to significant concerns regarding the relationship between music and mathematics: from the Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (1581) through the late discourses inmanuscript (ca. 1589–91), the acoustic investigations and theoretical contributions of Vincenzo have been understood to represent the defeat of numerology and the disenchantment of a traditional Pythagorean or Neoplatonic worldview. Where the source documents themselves strikingly diverge from such an account, the discrepancies have been correspondingly portrayed as clear departures from an empirical orientation, and as wholly extraneous for that very reason to Vincenzo’s genuine findings and fundamental intentions.