Venetian polychoral style
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The Venetian polychoral style was a type of music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras which involved spatially separate choirs singing in alternation. It represented a major stylistic shift from the prevailing polyphonic writing of the middle Renaissance, and was one of the major stylistic developments which led directly to the formation of what is now known as the Baroque style. A commonly encountered term for the separated choirs is cori spezzati—literally, "broken choruses" as they were called, added the element of spatial contrast to Venetian music. These included the echo device, so important in the entire baroque tradition; the alternation of two contrasting bodies of sound, such as chorus against chorus, single line versus a full choir, solo voice opposing full choir, instruments pitted against voices and contrasting instrumental groups; the alternation of high and low voices; soft level of sound alternated with a loud one; the fragmentary versus the continuous; and blocked chords contrasting with flowing counterpoint.
Principle of duality, or opposing elements, is the basis for the concertato or concerted style, both words being derived from concertare, meaning "to compete with or to strive against." The word appears in the title of some works Giovanni published jointly with his uncle Andrea Gabrieli in 1587: Concerti...per voice at stromenti ("Concertos...for voices and instruments"). The term later came to be widely used, with such titles as Concerti Ecclesiastici (Church Concertos) appearing frequently.
History of the style
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The style arose in Northern Italian churches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and proved to be a good fit for the architectural peculiarities of the imposing Basilica
The peak of development of the style was in the late 1580s and 1590s, while
After 1603, a basso continuo was added to the already considerable forces at San Marco—orchestra, soloists, choir—a further step toward the Baroque cantata. Music at San Marco went through a period of growth and decline, but the fame of the institution spread far. Although the repertoire eventually included music in the concertato style, as well as the conservative stile antico, works in the polychoral style maintained a secure place in the San Marco repertoire into the 1800s.
Representative seventeenth-century composers
- Adrian Willaert
- Cipriano de Rore
- Gioseffo Zarlino
- Claudio Merulo
- Giovanni Gabrieli
- Andrea Gabrieli
- Claudio Monteverdi
- Hans Leo Hassler
- Heinrich Schütz
- Francesco Cavalli
Examples of the style
- Adrian Willaert, Salmi spezzati
- Andrea Gabrieli, Psalmi Davidici
- Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Symphoniae sacrae
- Heinrich Schütz, Psalmen Davids (1619)
- Claudio Monteverdi, "Zefiro torna" ("Return, O Zephyr")
See also
References
- ^ Laura Moretti, "Architectural Spaces for Music: Jacopo Sansovino and Adrian Willaert at St Mark's". Early Music History. 23: 153-184.
- ^ James H. Moore, "The "Vespero delli Cinque Laudate" and the Role of "Salmi Spezzati" at St. Mark's". Journal of the American Musicological Society. 34 (2): 249-278.
- "Venice", "cori spezzati," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2(Note: curiously, there is no article for "polychoral" or "polychoral style" in the New Grove.)
- Carver, Anthony F, The development of sacred polychoral music to the time of Schütz. Cambridge (Cambridgeshire); New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN 0521303982
- ISBN 0-393-09530-4
- ISBN 0-393-09745-5
- The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-674-61525-5(Has a short but informative article on this.)