Venetian polychoral style

vocal manifestations eventually led to such diverse musi-

cal ideas as the chorale cantata, the concerto grosso, and
the sonata.
The peak of development of the style was in the late
1580s and 1590s, while Giovanni Gabrieli was organist
at San Marco and principal composer, and while Gioseo
Zarlino was still maestro di cappella. Gabrieli was the
rst to specify instruments specically, including large
choirs of brass; he also began to specify dynamics, and
to develop the echo eects for which he became fa-
mous. The fame of the spectacular, sonorous music of
San Marco at this time spread across Europe, and numer-
San Marco in the evening. The spacious, resonant interior of this ous musicians came to Venice to hear, to study, to absorb
building was an inspiration for the development of this musical and bring back what they learned to their countries of ori-
style. gin. Germany, in particular, was a region where com-
posers began to work in a locally-modied form of the
The Venetian polychoral style was a type of music of Venetian style - most notably Heinrich Schtz - , though
the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras which in- polychoral works were also composed elsewhere, such as
volved spatially separate choirs singing in alternation. It the many masses written in Spain by Toms Luis de Vic-
represented a major stylistic shift from the prevailing toria.
polyphonic writing of the middle Renaissance, and was
one of the major stylistic developments which led directly After 1603, a basso continuo was added to the already
to the formation of what we now know as the Baroque considerable forces at San Marcoorchestra, soloists,
style. A commonly encountered term for the separated choira further step towards the Baroque cantata. Mu-
choirs is cori spezzatiliterally, separated choirs. sic at San Marco went through a period of decline, but the
fame of the music had spread far, and transformed into
the concertato style. In 1612 Claudio Monteverdi was
appointed maestro di cappella, and though he brought the
1 History of the style musical standards back to a high level, the vogue of the
polychoral style had passed; concertato music, much with
The style arose from the architectural peculiarities of solo voice, was now the norm; the productions of this late
the imposing Basilica San Marco di Venezia in Venice. period are identiably Baroque.
Aware of the sound delay caused by the distance between
opposing choir lofts, composers began to take advantage
of that as a useful special eect. Since it was dicult
to get widely separated choirs to sing the same music
2 Representative composers
simultaneously (especially before modern techniques of
conducting were developed), composers such as Adrian Adrian Willaert
Willaert, the maestro di cappella of St. Marks in the Cipriano de Rore
1540s, solved the problem by writing antiphonal music
where opposing choirs would sing successive, often con- Gioseo Zarlino
trasting phrases of the music; the stereo eect proved to
be popular, and soon other composers were imitating the Claudio Merulo
idea, and not only in St. Marks but in other large cathe- Giovanni Gabrieli
drals in Italy. This was a rare but interesting case of the
architectural peculiarities of a single building inuencing Andrea Gabrieli
the development of a style which not only became popu-
lar all over Europe, but dened, in part, the shift from the Claudio Monteverdi
Renaissance to the Baroque era. The idea of dierent Hans Leo Hassler
groups singing in alternation gradually evolved into the
concertato style, which in its dierent instrumental and Heinrich Schtz

1
2 6 EXTERNAL LINKS

3 Examples of the style

Adrian Willaert, Salmi spezzati

Andrea Gabrieli, Psalmi Davidici

Giovanni Gabrieli, Symphoniae sacrae

In Ecclesiis
Sonata pian' e forte

Heinrich Schtz, Psalmen Davids (1619)

4 See also
Venetian School

5 References
Venice, cori spezzati, in The New Grove Dic-
tionary 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 poly-

choral music to the time of Schtz. Cambridge
(Cambridgeshire); New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1988. ISBN 0521303982
Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New
York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-
09530-4

Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era. New

York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1947. ISBN 0-393-
09745-5
The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don
Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1986. ISBN 0-674-61525-5 (Has a
short but informative article on this.)

6 External links
D-sites.net: Musical Space: an inquiry into three
kinds of audible space
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7 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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Venetian polychoral style Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_polychoral_style?oldid=750634163 Contributors: TUF-KAT,
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