Michelagnolo Galilei
Michelagnolo Galilei
Genres: italian, 17th century
Similar artists via Last.fm
Jean Mercure
About Michelagnolo Galilei
Michelagnolo Galilei (18 December 1575 – 3 January 1631) was an Italian lutenist and composer who worked at the hinge between late Renaissance idioms and early Baroque style, and whose surviving music is centred on a single substantial printed collection. Born in Florence, he was the son of the theorist and lutenist Vincenzo Galilei and the younger brother of Galileo Galilei. After Vincenzo’s death in 1591, Michelagnolo’s early professional prospects became entangled with family circumstance, and open biographical summaries place him first in northern Italy and then, still very young, in the wider European market for foreign virtuosi. He is reported to have travelled to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1590s, a region with strong demand for imported Italian musicians, before later establishing himself in Munich at the Bavarian court, where he remained for the rest of his life. The later phase of his biography is especially well illuminated by surviving correspondence with Galileo, which modern narratives describe as increasingly fraught, with repeated requests for financial support. Galilei’s secure compositional legacy is dominated by music for ten-course lute published in Munich in 1620 as Il primo libro d’intavolatura di liuto, a collection explicitly presenting him as a Florentine nobleman and lutenist in the service of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, and containing a wide range of genres—toccatas, galliards, correntes, voltas, passamezzi, and saltarellos—assembled in a manner that reflects contemporary suite-like grouping and the stylistic crosscurrents of the time. Open programme-note and retailer commentary repeatedly characterises this book as combining Italian keyboard-like freedom in the toccatas with the newer French dance idioms then circulating across Europe, and modern lute scholarship treats the 1620 print as a key witness to the repertoire’s northward transmission and to evolving harmonic language in early Baroque plucked-string writing.
Taken from Last.fm
527 listeners · 3,034 plays via Last.fm