Giovanni Camillo Maffei da Solofra was an Italian doctor, philosopher and musician of the mid-16th century, in the middle Renaissance.
Between 1562 and 1573 he lived in Naples, where he served
Giovanni di Capua Giovanni may refer to:
* Giovanni (name), an Italian male given name and surname
* Giovanni (meteorology), a Web interface for users to analyze NASA's gridded data
* ''Don Giovanni'', a 1787 opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, based on the legend of ...
, count of Altavilla and music lover. In his philosophy he was
Aristotelian. He wrote a treatise on vocal music, "Lettera sul canto", in which he sets forth rules for the singing of
diminution
In Western music and music theory, diminution (from Medieval Latin ''diminutio'', alteration of Latin ''deminutio'', decrease) has four distinct meanings. Diminution may be a form of embellishment in which a long note is divided into a series of ...
s. The letter is included in the two volumes of his ''Lettere'' (Napoli, 1562) also cited as ''Discorso delta voce e del modo d'apparare di cantar di garganta'', and ''Scala naturale, overo Fantasia dolcissima, intorno alle cose occulte e desiderate nella filosofia'' (Venice, 1564), dedicated to the Count of Altavilla, where it runs on various points of natural history, physics, meteorology, geology and chemistry.
Italian music theorists
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