the purely sensuous adornments of counterpoint and return to an art truly founded on the imitation of
nature.
Galilei cast this inflammatory thesis into the suitably Platonic form of a dialogue: the Dialogo della
musica antica e della moderna (“Dialogue on music ancient and modern”), in which the two fictitious
interlocutors were named after Count Bardi (to whom the book was dedicated on publication in 1581)
and Piero Strozzi, a noble dilettante in Bardi’s circle, called the Camerata. Coming from a practicing
musician, and couched in bluntly argumentative language, this formulation of principles derived from
Mei’s purely “academic” research caused controversy (Zarlino himself retorting acidly a few years later
in an addendum to his treatise called Sopplimenti musicali).
Galilei’s strongest invective was reserved for the madrigalists (this despite the fact that he himself
had published a book of madrigals seven years earlier and would publish another six years later),
because the madrigalists already thought of themselves as the humanist reformers of music. They already
claimed to be imitating nature in their work, and they were having an enormous influence even on
composers of church music during the Counter Reformation. Galilei, presuming to speak for the Greeks,
ridiculed the madrigalists for committing a travesty. “Our practicing contrapuntists,” he sneered, will say
that they have imitated the words, each time they set to music a sonnet, a madrigal, or other poem in which one finds
verses that say, for example, “Bitter heart and fierce, cruel desire,” which happens to be the first line of one of Petrarch’s
sonnets, and they see to it that between the parts that sing it are many sevenths, fourths, seconds, and major sixths, and
that by means of these they have made a rough, bitter, grating sound in their listeners’ ears. Another time they will say
they have imitated the words when among the ideas in the text are some that have the meaning “to flee,” or “to fly.”
These will be declaimed with such speed and so little grace as can hardly be imagined. As for words like “to vanish,” “to
swoon,” “to die,” they will make the parts fall silent so abruptly that far from inducing any such effect, they will move their
listeners to laughter, or else to indignation, should they feel they are being mocked .... Finding words denoting contrasts of
color, like “dark” versus “light hair,” and the like, they will set them to black and white notes respectively, to express their
meaning most astutely and cleverly, they say, never mind that they have altogether subordinated the sense of hearing to
accidents of form and color which are properly the domain of vision and touch. Another time, they will have a verse like
this: “He descended into Hell, into the lap of Pluto,” and they will make one of the parts descend so that the singer sounds
to the listener more like someone moaning to frighten and terrify little girls than like someone singing something sensible.
And where they find the opposite—“He doth aspire to the stars”—they will have it declaimed in such a high register that
no one screaming in pain has ever equaled it.Unhappy men, they do not realize that if any of the famous orators of old had ever
once declaimed two words in such a fashion they would have moved their hearers to
laughter and contempt at once, and would have been ridiculed and despised by them
as stupid, abject, and worthless men.^2We have seen all of these techniques and many more of the same sort practiced with utmost
seriousness and effectiveness. Even “Augenmusik”—music for the eye, as in Galileo’s example of white
and black notes—had a perfectly serious motivation and could produce hair-raising aural effects in the
hands a musician like Jacobus Gallus (see his St. John Passion in the previous chapter, Ex. 18-12). But
Galilei had a certain point in ridiculing “madrigalisms”: they are indirect and artificial imitations, based
on analogies—i.e., shared features—rather than homologies, real structural congruities. As such they are
like plays on words, or witticisms. Depending on mechanisms of wit, they can be taken as humor—and
indeed, we often do react to a madrigalism, even a serious one, the way we do to a joke: we laugh with
delight when we “get it.”