Vincenzo Galilei occupation lutenist
Vincenzo Galilei (born 3 April 1520, Santa Maria a Monte, Republic of Florence; died 2 July 1591, Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany) was an Italian lutenist, composer, and music theorist. His children included the astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei and the lute virtuoso and composer Michelagnolo Galilei. Vincenzo was a figure in the musical life of the late Renaissance and contributed significantly to the musical revolution which demarcates the beginning of the Baroque era.
In his study of pitch and string tension, Galilei produced perhaps the first non-linear mathematical description of a natural phenomenon known to history. Some credit him with directing the activity of his son away from pure, abstract mathematics and towards experimentation using mathematical quantitative description of the results, a direction of importance for the history of physics and natural science.Biography
He was born in 1520 in Santa Maria a Monte, near Pisa, Tuscany and began studying the lute at an early age. His mother was from San Vincenzo near Livorno. Sometime before 1562 he moved to Pisa, where on 5 July he married Giulia Ammannati of a noble family. Galileo Galilei was the oldest of six or seven children; another son, Michelagnolo, born in 1575, became an accomplished lutenist and composer.
Galilei was a skilled player of the lute who early in life attracted the attention of powerful patrons. In 1563 he met Gioseffo Zarlino, the most important music theorist of the sixteenth century, in Venice, and began studying with him. Somewhat later he became interested in the attempts to revive ancient Greek music and drama, by way of his association with the Florentine Camerata, a group of poets, musicians and intellectuals led by Count Giovanni de' Bardi, as well as his contacts with Girolamo Mei, the foremost scholar of the time of ancient Greek music. 
Galilei composed two books of madrigals, as well as music for lute, and a considerable quantity of music for voice and lute; this latter category is considered to be his most important contribution as it anticipated in many ways the style of the early Baroque.
The use of recitative in opera is widely attributed to Galilei, since he was one of the inventors of monody, the musical style closest to recitative.
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