Francisco de Salinas

Francisco de Salinas (Burgos, 1513 – Salamanca, 1590) was one of the great music theorists of the sixteenth century and, at the same time, an organist of considerable distinction. Blind from childhood, he was trained in organ and singing so that he could earn his living through music. His life must be understood against the backdrop of imperial Spain under Charles V, whose court and ecclesiastical circles opened the doors of the university and of the musical life of the age to him.

His father was an official in the imperial treasury. Once he had gained proficiency on the organ, Salinas taught a young woman in exchange for Latin lessons, and later studied philosophy, Greek and the liberal arts at the University of Salamanca, where he was probably a pupil of Hernán Núñez. Around 1537 he abandoned his studies because of his family's financial difficulties and entered the service of the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, Pedro Gómez Sarmiento de Villandrando, who took him to Rome. There he began to study music theory, focusing on the Greek authors and on Boethius. After the cardinal's death in 1541, he received the support of other churchmen and, having been ordained a priest, obtained ecclesiastical benefices in the dioceses of Jaén and Burgos. Between 1553 and 1558 he was organist of the viceregal chapel in Naples, and he later held posts in the cathedrals of Sigüenza and León. In 1567 he won, by competitive examination, the chair of theoretical and practical music at Salamanca, a post he held until 1587, although he continued to teach.

His principal work, De musica libri septem, published in Salamanca in 1577, aimed to gather the theoretical knowledge transmitted by the finest ancient and modern authors. Unlike Boethius and Gafurio, who subordinated music to mathematics, Salinas insisted that his conclusions be verified by the ear, and he criticised the authors he cited with rigour. He defended just intonation, in the line of Fogliano and Zarlino, and maintained that the ancients should be understood on their own terms and not as theorists of his own era. His treatise is exceptional in its distribution: after the first book, devoted to numbers and proportions, the remaining books are divided equally between harmonics and rhythm. The rhythmic part is the best known, as it includes more than fifty Castilian folk songs used to illustrate the metres, making it a valuable anthology of sixteenth-century folklore.

Salinas is remembered as a bridge between humanist scholarship and musical practice. His critical rigour and his attention to the ear place him among the most influential theorists of his time.