'THE MOST IMPORTANT AND INFLUENTIAL WORK
IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC THEORY'
ZARLINO, Gioseffo.
Le Istitutioni harmoniche … nelle quali; oltra le materie appartenenti alla musica; si trovano dichiarati molti luoghi di Poeti, d’Historici, & di Filosofi…
Venice, [Pietro da Fino], 1558.
Folio, pp. [12], 347, [1]; woodcut publisher’s device to title-page; woodcut initials, woodcut diagrams in parts I and II, woodcut music in parts III and IV; dampstains to foot of first third of text and to head towards the end, short wormtracks to blank upper margin of first three leaves, upper outer corner of the last leaf restored, withal a good copy; bound in eighteenth-century quarter vellum and paper boards, block-printed in red, black and ochre in a floral pattern; 1636 inscription ‘De i libri del Cav[alier]e Ant[oni]o Benedetti … ?co[stato] soldi quaranta in Faenza’ to foot of title-page; 1859 presentation inscription to head of title from General Émile Mellinet to Jean-Georges Kastner ‘Souvenir à l’ami Georges Kastner pendant la campagne d’Italie’ (see below).
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Le Istitutioni harmoniche … nelle quali; oltra le materie appartenenti alla musica; si trovano dichiarati molti luoghi di Poeti, d’Historici, & di Filosofi…
First edition, rare, of ‘arguably the most important and influential book in the history of music theory … [It] opened the way for the new tonality which has governed music from the seventeenth century to the present day’ (PMM).
‘Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558) is one of the most important works of music theory. Zarlino [1517–1590] aimed in it to unite speculative theory with the practice of composition on the grounds that “music considered in its ultimate perfection contains these two parts so closely joined that one cannot be separated from the other” (i, 2). The composer must not be content to master his craft; he should know the reason for what he does, and this can be discovered through an alliance of the rational and sensory faculties. The first two parts (they are designated “books” in the 1573 edition) present the traditional curriculum of musica theorica from a fresh viewpoint. In part I Zarlino reviewed the philosophical, cosmological, and mathematical basis of music. Part II sets forth the Greek tonal system and supplants it with a modern theory of consonances and tuning … Zarlino acknowledged that the numerical criteria that he established in parts I and II for the tuning of the consonances did not apply to instrumental music, which employed artificial tunings made necessary by the imperfection of instruments. But in the natural medium of the voice it was possible, he maintained, to realize all the inherent perfection of harmony’ (Grove online).
Zarlino’s rules of counterpoint had wide influence across Europe, but his theoretical foundations were quickly challenged, first by Giovanni Battista Benedetti, and then by Vincenzo Galilei, whose Dialogo (1581) ‘pointed out numerous instances in which Zarlino had misunderstood his ancient sources. Zarlino replied at great length in his Sopplimenti musicali (1588), in which he displayed much greater penetration into the ancient authors, particularly Aristoxenus and Ptolemy … than in Le istitutioni harmoniche; but he failed to refute Galilei’s valid criticisms’ (ibid.).
Provenance:
1. Purchased in Faenza in 1636 for forty soldi by Cavaliere Antonio Benedetti, a nobleman who was involved with the city’s Accademia dei Filoponi and in 1647 arranged for the publication of a revised edition of its statutes. Was he perhaps related to the Giovanni Battista Benedetti who had been the first to challenge Zarlino’s theoretical model?
2. General Émile Mellinet (1798–1894) inscribed this copy ‘to my friend Georges Kastner … during the Italian Campaign 1859’ (trans.). The Second Italian War of Independence was fought in that year between the Second Empire, with the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Austrian Empire, and helped pave the way towards Italian unification. The composer and musicologist Jean-Georges Kastner (1810–1867) published several works on military music (at least one mentioning Mellinet) and both were friends with Adolphe Sax. Six years later, General Mellinet, an amateur composer himself, would become a judge of musical competitions at Paris’s Conservatoire impérial de musique et de déclamation alongside Kastner.
BM STC Italian, p. 742; EDIT16 CNCE 25277; USTC 864226; PMM 81; Eitner X 331–332; Gregory & Bartlett 296; Graesse VIII, p. 508; Grove 20–646; not in Adams (cf. Z-77).
