- Alessandro Piccinini

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- Michelagnolo Galilei

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- Simone Molinaro

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Paul Beier graduated from the Royal College of Music, London, under Diana Poulton. He has performed throughout Europe, Australia, North and South America with a solo repertoire extending from the early Sixteenth Century to the music of Bach and Weiss. Founder and director of Ensemble Galilei, now renamed Galatea, he also collaborates with many baroque music groups.

His CDs (9 solo lute recordings and 4 as director of Galatea) have been received very well; some of them earned important recognition such as Disque du Mois of Rortoire, 5 Diapason, 5 stars of Goldberg, etc. Since 1981 he teaches Lute, Basso Continuo and Renaissance Ensemble at the Civica Scuola di Musica (Accademia Internazionale della Musica) in Milan.

Program Notes for "Michelagnolo Galilei: Sonate from Il primo libro d'Intavolatura di liuto (1620)"

The age of the Counter Reformation, more than any other in the history of civilization, was marked by a close connection between science and art, and the birth of experimental method coincided with the most ardent experimentation in the field of music. The ideal focal point in this unrepeatable confluence is represented by the name of Galileo Galilei, whose musical disposition was remarked by Viviani as follows:

"Amoung his most treasured entertainments were the practice of music and playing upon the frets of the lute, in which, with the example and instruction of his father, he came to such excellence, that he found himself in competition with the best professors of the time in Florence and Pisa, being most rich of invention on that instrument, and exceeding his father in gentleness and grace of playing; he retained this suave style always even to his last days."

His father was the Vincenzo Galilei who contributed in such a decisive way to the recovery of the music of the ancient Greeks and to the new style of accompanied monody welcomed with enthusiasm in Florence at the end of the 16th-century. Vincenzo transmitted the qualities of lute virtuoso to his children: besides the first-born Galileo, the youngest child Michelagnolo was a lutenist. Born in Florence the 18th of December 1575 (as recorded in a horoscope generated for his brother by the famous scientist), the education of Michelagnolo was dedicated from the very beginning to his training as a professional musician. At the age of just nine years, in fact, he signed the dedication of a volume of instructional compositions by his father, eloquent as to the type of study he had already undertaken:

"My father having composed the present two-part Counterpoints a few days ago, so that with them (after lessons of greater import that he has given me to study) I could exercise the voice and the playing of the viola with the help of a solo,... ".

The death of Vincenzo in 1591 probably destroyed a secret plan to place his musician son in the court of the Grand Duke. Thus Michelagnolo, sixteen years old, had to be given into the custody of his older brother the scientist, and so he joined Galileo in Padova; from this moment on the lives of the two brothers were to be closely intertwined, if also problematic. Thanks to the vast epistolary documentation compiled by Antonio Favario in his edition of the works of Galileo (Florence 1890 - 1909), and to a few specialized studies (for example the recent one by Claude Chavel in his introduction to the facsimilie edition of Galilei's Primo Libro d'Intavolatura, (Minkoff, Geneva 1988), we can plausibly reconstruct Michelagnolo's biography.

Galileo, then, was to materially direct the future life of his brother: after having him come to Padova in 1592, he sent him off the following May to Poland, surely in the train of some nobleman of those parts, possibly a student whose acquaintance had been made in his Padovan studio. In 1599 Michelagnolo returned to Italy; Galileo now tried to find, with the help of friends (particularly that of Emilio del Cavaliere), an appointment for him at the Medici court, but without success, due to the overabundance of musicians euphoric over the new music-theater "teatro in musica" in Florence. Thus, Galileo had no choice but to send his brother back to Poland in the summer of 1600, again in the service of "that Polish gentleman in whose care Michelagnolo had been previously", this time, however, with a very high salary, and every convenience. (His protector has generally been identified as Prince Radziwill of Vilna, in Lithuania, but there is no documentary confirmation of this.) Michelagnolo's son, Vincenzo, in his turn also a lutenist, was to retain the connection with Poland; Michelagnolo, however, was again in Padova in 1606: one can easily imagine the disappointment of his brother. Galileo aimed higher this time, to the court of the Duke of Bavaria in Munich, where Michelagnolo subsequently moved, definitively, in 1608. There he married Anna Clara Bandinelli, who gave birth to seven children, of whom Alberto Cesere, as well as the above mentioned Vincenzo, were to become lutenists.

Galileo continued to procure lute strings for his brother from Florence "for his use and his students", and satisfied the desire of the Duke of Bavaria, via his brother, to obtain the scientist's latest books and that rarest of prizes, a telescope. In 1620, Il Primo Libro d'Intavolatura di liuto di Michelagnolo Galilei [. . .] Liutista del Ser.mo Sig.r Duca Massimiliano di Baviera appeared in Munich, a collection of almost all of the surviving works of the author. (Excluded are a few works scattered through printed anthologies and manuscripts, all of Bavarian origin.) The frontispiece and the dedication are written in Italian (notice of a contemporary version in German does not seem credible), which suggests the possibility that Galilei might at first have intended to print the book in Italy, or to dedicate it to an Italian prince. In point of fact, even before his first departure to Poland Michelagnolo possesed a collection of his "sonate" which were particularly appreciated in Florence, as seen in a letter, until now overlooked by scholars, written to Galileo by his mother in 1593:

". . . [Michelagnolo] says that you gave certain sonate into the posession of I know not which gentlemen, who sent here all the Princes asking for others similar to the ones they have, the which he took badly, and doesn't want to give them out anymore to anyone . . ."

The permanent appointment at Munich did not resolve the economic situation of Michelagnolo's family, and until his death in 1631 he did not quit bothering his brother, even up to their last encounter in Florence in 1628, with requests for money and for help with his children. Of his two lutenist sons, both were sent to Rome by the Duke of Bavaria to study the lute, theorbo, Italian and Latin; Vincenzo ended his days in Poland, after having saddened and disappointed his famous uncle, who became his guardian at the death of Michelagnolo; Alberto Cesere took over his father's position as official lutenist to the court of Munich until his death in 1692.

Until a few years ago only a single copy of the lute book printed by Michelagnolo was known to have survived, that in the British Library in London, originally owned by Albert Werl, author of a manuscript of the same period and possibly a student of Galilei; a second copy has recently been found in Crakow, a complete handwritten copy of the volume is the so-called "Pauer" manuscript. The book of 1620 is very important for several reasons: first, the extraordinary nature of a collection by an Italian author living abroad, written in "French" tablature for a lute of ten courses; then, the presence of the most modern compositional styles of the time, particularly evident in the durezze, dissonances, in the Italian manner of Kapsperger, style brise and the exploration of textural effects in the French style, and the still contrapuntal style as found in Lorenzino or Piccinini. But then, this kaleidoscope of influences is in fact the summation of the life work of the musician who, starting out in the school of his father Vincenzo, must have proceeded through many encounters with personages of the highest caliber: we think, for example, that his sons in Rome were students of Kapsperger, of a lutenist in the service of Cardinal Ludovesi who was probably Falconieri, and of a celebrated Parisian known as "Rene"

The collection presents twelve groups of compositions organized in ten different modal groups, each composed, in the style of proto-suites, of an opening toccata followed by one or more corrente and volte, with the addition of two gagliarda in the first suite. At the end of the collection are two passemezzi in two parts followed by saltarelli. Even at nearly four hundred years distance, the collection reveals itself to modern listeners as a high artistic witness to a period in the history of Italian and European music that is still, in good part, waiting to be discovered.

- Dinko Fabris

Musician's notes for "Michelagnolo Galilei: Sonate from Il primo libro d'Intavolatura di liuto (1620)"

We listen to the music of Michelagnolo Galilei entirely differently from the way it was perceived in his day, and it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to appreciate how a seventeenth century listener might have reacted upon hearing what to him must have seemed radical and astonishing and to us appears but delicate and rather subdued. That the ears of his public were not prepared for what he offered them, that indeed they were more likely to be shocked or even completely baffled, than to pleasantly and unquestioningly absorb the delicate tones of his instrument, we can begin to infer from the address to the reader with which Galilei introduces his only publication:

"...let him not think, finding in this work many harsh sounds [durezze] or dissonances, that they are printing mistakes, for they must be left as they are; and be assured that I have looked over the whole book meticulously many times and I am certain that it is absolutely correct."

Can we really imagine with what incredulity the first pursuers of this book, coming upon such, for them, wildly dissonant harmonies, tried to put right what seemed better explained as a printing mistake than the will of a sane musician, in an era in which, not so long ago, the very idea of such exposed "dissonance" as found in Galilei went against the rules of music and of civilized taste.

The modern performer of the music of Michagnolo Galilei, while he might despair of arousing in his listeners the amazement and disbelief Galilei must have reserved for his, can only go so far as to try and recreate the auditory conditions in which these emotions were once felt, within the limited scope of his choice of instrument and presentation of the music itself. Galilei, all too aware of the "difficult" nature of his music, tried in his preface to soften the impact for the uninitiated by not only cautioning him about the unorthodox musical content:

"Moreover, these, my sonate, might in part be found to be quite difficult, speaking, as always, to those above mentioned novices: they could content themselves, therefore, in the Correnti and Volte, to play the first and second parts plain, repeating them, and leaving aside the diminutions; in so doing the sonata will mot be made imperfect."

We are reminded here, in the question of diminutions (varied repeats of the dance movements), that Galilei was forging a radical break from the traditional, renaissance concept of passaggi, or florid melodic lines, to the frenzied, almost chaotic style we now complacently refer to as "style-brise. In this sense, modern listeners are well enough prepared for the shock, and the performer can feel confident that not only will they appreciate the inclusion of Galilei's sublime diminutions, they will not mind if we take up where the composer left off...

As to the type of instrument most suitable to his music, Galilei has left some indication: "... I say, therefore, to he who would like to play some of these my little pieces, it is necessary that he has a lute of ten courses ...". While this might lead us to consider, not without justification, the use of an Italian arciliuto or arch-lute, such as was the rage at this time south of the Alps, we would have to fit our arch-lute with just ten courses instead of the customary thirteen or fourteen, a compromise not much in keeping with the extreme qualities of Michagnolo and his music. Looking instead at the organological environment of the expatriate's adopted home in Germany and, by extension, France, we may find that the "French ten-course lute", that is, that species of large early 16-century Italian lute, already surpassed by contemporary instrument makers in Italy but highly treasured and regularly converted into ten-course instruments by their transalpine contemporaries, is ideally suited to our purposes.

The instrument I am proposing in this recording, then, is of modern construction, but based on the design of an extant instrument, originally built by the Bolognese maker Hans Frei sometime in the early sixteenth century, and converted, probably in France, to a ten-course lute in the first decade or so of the seventeenth century. The stringing is entirely in gut, but with some copper reinforcement in lower basses. The musical temperament, as determined by the unequal placement of the frets, is similar to that described in treatises for the lute of the period.

- Paul Beier