Richard Gutierrez
Music History II
Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sacrae Symphoniae

Giovanni Gabrieli was the organist and composer at St Mark’s cathedral in Venice. During his endeavor at the church, he experimented with the polychoral style, which had already been a feature of the works of earlier Venetian composers, Andrea Gabrieli, his uncle, being one of the composers. The cathedral was massive in size; the architecture of the building gave way for the stereo effect that Gabrieli experimented with. this was because of the huge balconies on both sides of the church. Gabrieli wrote a large number of pieces for cori spezzati, broken choirs, each having a call and effect type between the two choirs, and joining together during the climatic part. his most famous piece was written in 1597, gathering both choirs and instrumentalist to perform what we know as the Sacrae Symphoniae (sacred symphony), this which included the famous Sonata Pian’ e Forte. Pian’e Forte was the first piece in its time to specify the dynamics the composer wanted.

The 1597 Sacrae Symphoniae is Gabrieli’s best work that represents his earlier works of music as the organist of the Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, his job that he held from 1585 until his death in 1612. “Gabrieli’s years at the great Byzantine basilica coincided with the most brilliant period of its instrumental ensemble”. The ensemble being from the Doge’s palace at the time that had a very well established ensemble intact with more modern instruments at that time. The cornet and sackbuts (trombones) were the most prominent instruments at the Saint Mark church. Every now and then he would also throw in some strings to add color to the music. The music attracted many well-known virtuoso instrumentalists such as “capo de’ concerti Girolamo Dalla Casa and the renowned cornetist Giovanni Bassano.” Both are actually well known composers, but are more popular as performers than they are as composers. Giovanni Bassano actually wrote a book that helps with orchestrating vocal music in to instrumental music. His first book written in 1585, “Ricercate, passagi et cadentie, which details exactly how best to ornament passages when transcribing vocal music for instruments.”, obviously obsolete now, but still a staple in music history.
Most of the music written before 1597 uses “cori spezzati” which means broken choirs. Gabrieli was not the inventor of the broken choirs, but he was an innovator in a sense that he did not use cori spezzati to be part of a call and response, but to have two separate choirs performing together. “The Sacrae symphoniae of 1597 show Gabrieli moving towards a style in which thematic material is developed dynamically in dialogue form”. The symphony had a tonal center despite the separate choirs, and was still considered fairly simple writing. But, he was not deterred from using more dissonance in this piece to cause tension and release. “Form The harmonic idiom is still simple and essentially diatonic, with many cadential passages caused by frequent interchanges between the choirs...Gabrieli now tends to make greater use of dissonance…” “The melodic element is of greater importance than in the Concerti. Naturally, in the three- and four-choir works, harmony tends to be simpler than in double-choir pieces. These large-scale works, however, exploit color contrasts more than ever before.”. The norm for cori spezzati pieces were to have fairly simple forms used, and harmonize it in the simplest way possible. the bigger the choir was, the simpler it was to analyze, but the canzonas in this piece were far more complex than a typical piece per say.
Giovanni Gabrieli was intrigued by the use of ornamentation in his music, but he has lacked the skill of writing in the ornamentation and it caused his music to suffer the consequences. “Gabrieli was interested in the effects by which ornamentation can alter the whole conception of a piece.”. According to the book “Oxford Studies of Composers, Giovanni Gabrieli” by Dennis Arnold, Gabrieli was a great improviser on the organ, taking advantage of the free form many toccatas at the time let him have, but was still not very good at adding ornamentations to his pieces. Gabrieli, was not a great writer of virtuoso toccatas. He has written many essays on the matter, and those that have survived and were analyzed, they seemed pretty dull. His earlier toccatas were not that impressive, it was not until his 9th toccata that Gabrieli started embracing Merulo’s teachings and style of embellishments that they started to be more interesting.
When Giovanni Gabrieli died in August 1612 in Venice, there was not a very big reaction and seemed forgotten. In relation to Monteverdi’s death thirty years later, the city of Venice went into mourning. Though he did not get the recognition he deserved at the time, “we sense that Giovanni had been a remarkable human being...in 1615 the great posthumous collections appeared.”. His friends and family gathered up his music and possibly sold his music. His pupils loved his works, Schutz, respected his mentor. even though he died sixty years later, Schutz never forgot his pupillage. “Ye Gods, what a man he was…” When Schutz composed his “Psalms of David” in 1619, the alleluia refrains are unmistakingly an homage to Gabrieli. Though his earlier works were somewhat ignored, Gabrieli’s later works were a big influence in the German community of music years later. J.S. Bach, a hundred years after Gabrieli’s death, was still writing double-choir motets, and was more concerned with the text of the music and feeding emotion to the text with music accompaniment much like he did before his death. The link between Bach and Gabrieli may seemed weird at first, but when it comes to comparing them, the similarities are too much to be ignored.

Bibliography

Gabrieli: Sacrae Symphoniae." Hyperion Records. Web. 02 Feb. 2016.
<http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA66908>

David Bryant. "Gabrieli, Giovanni." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 2 Feb. 2016.<http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40693>.

Dennis, Harold. Giovanni Gabrieli. 12th ed. London; New York: Oxford UP, 1974. Print. Oxford Studies of Composers.