Vincenzo Galilei

Hannah French and Zak Ozmo explore the life and work of the extraordinary 16th-century Italian lutenist, music theorist and composer Vincenzo Galilei, who was born around 500 years ago.Galilei was a hugely important figure in the musical life of the late Renaissance - a polymath, who studied the science of music as well as performing it, and was clearly an enormous inspiration for his son - the astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei. Some scholars credit him with directing the activity of his son away from pure, abstract mathematics and towards experimentation using mathematical quantitative description of the results. And Zak Ozmo says there is a case for regarding him as the father of Baroque music, pre-empting the work of Monteverdi and possibly influencing JS Bach to compose the Well-Tempered Clavier over a century later.We also hear from Acoustic Engineer, Professor Trevor Cox, who looks at the practical experiments Galilei carried out to see if Pythagoras's theories about string lengths in musical instruments were correct.