Gioseffo Zarlino Simulacrum

The Life

Gioseffo Zarlino was born in Chioggia, on the Venetian lagoon, in 1517, the son of a prosperous local family. He received a Franciscan education, took minor orders, and was ordained priest in 1541. Musical instruction came from several teachers in Chioggia, but the formative influence of his career arrived in 1541 when he moved to Venice and became a pupil of Adrian Willaert, the Netherlandish composer who had been Maestro di Cappella at St Mark’s Basilica since 1527. Willaert’s cappella was at that point the leading musical institution of Italy, and Zarlino absorbed not only the techniques of its polyphony but the spirit of a Venetian musical culture that combined practical sophistication with humanist theoretical ambition.

He succeeded his friend Cipriano de Rore as Maestro di Cappella at St Mark’s in 1565, a post he held until his death in 1590. His reputation rested not on his compositions — respectable but not exceptional — but on his writings: Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558), Dimostrationi harmoniche (1571), and Sopplimenti musicali (1588), the last written in defence of his theoretical positions against the attacks of his former pupil Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer). By his death Zarlino was the most respected music theorist in Europe.

The Thought

The central argument of Le istitutioni harmoniche was that the theoretical basis of consonance should be extended beyond the Pythagorean tradition. That tradition, inherited through Boethius and dominant in medieval theory, had admitted only the octave (2:1), the fifth (3:2), and the fourth (4:3) as true consonances, on the ground that these alone were ratios of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 (the sacred tetractys). Thirds and sixths — the vertical intervals that sixteenth-century polyphony was using everywhere as stable sonorities — were classed as dissonances or, at best, as imperfect intervals with uncertain theoretical status. Zarlino’s move was to extend the ratio base to the first six numbers — the senario — which yielded the major third (5:4), the minor third (6:5), and the major sixth (5:3) as legitimate consonances mathematically derived from the same natural numerical order. The minor sixth (8:5) fell just outside but could be accommodated as a derived proportion. Polyphonic practice was vindicated by theory.

The second distinctive contribution, embedded within the same treatise, was the systematic distinction between two classes of vertical sonority: harmonia maggiore, in which a major third stands below a minor third within the fifth (C–E–G), and harmonia minore, in which a minor third stands below a major (C–E♭–G). Zarlino was the first theorist to formalise this distinction as theoretically grounded rather than as mere empirical observation, and in doing so he laid the conceptual foundation for what would, a century and a half later, become the major and minor modes of the tonal system. He did not yet have a concept of key, of tonic and dominant function, or of modulation — those belong to Rameau and the tonal theorists who built on his work — but the distinction between the two harmoniae was the seed. The third layer of his achievement was to show that the rules of counterpoint could be derived from the nature of consonance itself: parallel fifths forbidden because consecutive perfect consonances erase the independence of voices; dissonances required to prepare and resolve because they borrow their existence from consonance. Nothing in counterpoint was to be a mere rule; everything was to have a rational ground.

The Legacy

Le istitutioni harmoniche was the authoritative music-theoretical treatise of the later sixteenth century and remained influential well into the seventeenth. Its specific contributions — the senario argument for the legitimacy of thirds and sixths, the harmonia maggiore/minore distinction, the rational grounding of counterpoint — entered the theoretical common ground of the Italian school and through it of European theory generally. Zarlino’s most consequential critic was his own former pupil Vincenzo Galilei, who in the 1580s attacked the senario doctrine on empirical grounds, arguing that the ratios of consonance as perceived by the ear did not correspond to the pure mathematical proportions Zarlino had derived. This controversy foreshadowed the broader shift, over the following century, from Renaissance rationalism to Baroque empiricism and the tonal theory that emerged from it.

For the student of Renaissance polyphony, Zarlino remains the indispensable theoretical reference. His treatises are the point at which one can see medieval Pythagorean theory being consciously expanded to accommodate sixteenth-century polyphonic practice, and at which the conceptual distinction between major and minor is being made explicit for the first time in its modern form. Rameau, in the eighteenth century, would ground the same distinction differently — in the corps sonore rather than the senario, in physics rather than arithmetic — but he would build on foundations Zarlino had laid.