The other brother: music by Galileo Galilei's younger brother on this lovely new EP

It is now moderately well-known that the great scientist Galileo Galilei's father, Vincenzo was a fine musician and there have been music and music theatre projects linking the two such as Clare Norburn's Galileo which premiered at the Brighton Early Music Festival in 2016 [see my review]. 

In fact, the whole family seems to have been musical. Vincenzo was a lutenist and Galileo would play lute duets with his father. As a young man he assisted his father's experiments to prove that equal temperament was better than mean-tone tuning, and as his father was a member of the Florentine Camerata, whose experiments led to the development of monody and to opera, the music in Galileo's life was cutting edge. Galileo was present at, and almost certainly involved in, the creation of the Florentine Intermedi of 1589, a musico-dramatic presentation which was an important pre-cursor of opera.

But Galileo had a younger brother, Michelangelo and he was a musician too though his music is far less well-known. Echo ex iove from lutenist Israel Golani is an EP from Solaire Records (available on BandCamp) which presents six short dances by Michelangelo Galilei (1575-1631). The EP is something of a follow-up to Golani's previous disc for Solaire Records, In the Garden of Polyphony, exploration of the 16th-century French penchant for lute music, notably transcriptions of polyphonic vocal music [see my review]

Michelangelo Galilei was something of a child prodigy. His father, Vincenzo, died when Michelangelo was just sixteen and only two years later he was sent to the the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where foreign musicians were much in demand, possibly under the wing of the powerful Lithuanian Radziwiłł family. He tried to come back to Florence, but failed to find employment at the court of the Grand Duke, however in 1607 he moved to the court of Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria where he stayed until his death. Of his eight children, three became lutenists.

Whatever musical success he had, money was clearly tight and much of his surviving correspondence with Galileo is about money. 

Most of his music is for lute, the ten-course lute and his book Il primo libro d'intavolatura di liuto was published in 1620. Israel Golani plays a suite of six dances beginning with a toccata, then corrente, passamezzo, saltarello and volta. There is an engagingly melodic quality to this music, but also a florid quality too. The suite makes a delightful EP with a lovely engaging quality to Golani's playing. I would not want a full-length disc of this music, but it would be lovely to have more.

Michelangelo Galilei: Echo ex iove - Israel Golani (lute) - Solaire Records