We can credit a Spaniard with having offered one of the earliest written descriptions of tempo, if one less scientific than what Mersenne envisioned. In time, it would become standard practice for composers to include tempo indications on their music, written instructions reflecting the speed at which the music should be dispatched. Yet when Luis de Milan (ca. 1500–ca. 1560) incorporated the following directions in his 1535 collection of pieces for vihuela, or lute, entitled El maestro, the concept was altogether novel: “Ni muy apriessa ni muy a espacio sino con un compas bien mesurado,” that is, “neither too quickly nor too slowly, but at a moderate tempo.” However subjective, the instructions Milan’s publication carried with it proved well ahead of their time. El maestro prefaced the appearance of Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle by one hundred years. Nearly another century would elapse before indications such as alegro [sic], adagio and presto—terms that would become commonly associated with musical tempo—began to surface with any regularity.

If Milan’s El maestro was an outlier, the music of Italian keyboardist and composer Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583– 1643) set the stage for any number of musical advances. Among the most influential keyboard composers at the close of the Renaissance and start of the Baroque, Frescobaldi demonstrated a masterful treatment of traditional forms, kaleidoscopic textures, improvisatory finesse and contrapuntal command. While his music influenced a handful of later Baroque masters, J. S. Bach and Henry Purcell among them, the Ferrara-born keyboardist also pioneered the use of detailed performance instructions in combination with his printed scores. These directions appear for the first time as a full page of elegant prefatory notes in his First Book of solo keyboard works of 1615, illustrating the composer’s principal concern with matters of tempo: