This practice of doubling voices and singers was unique to Venice at this time, and is known by the term stile concertato, or the concerted style. (Literally – a consort of instruments and voices.) An early use of this term is found in a publication of masses, motets and madrigals by Giovanni Gabrieli in 1587, which he calls Concerti per voci e stromentati musicali. These pieces demonstrate polychoral writing on an ambitious scale. (Polychoral can be taken to mean music for voices with many parts, as distinct from polyphonic, which means music with parts having different rhythms simultaneously, or parts moving independently of one another.)

Whereas the motets are largely through-composed, their texts usually being non-biblical poetic prose, the biblical psalm settings are structured sectionally, verse by verse, with changes to texture and sonority, contrasts between counterpoint, imitation and homophony, and constant variation between thin textures and dense textures. Gabrieli was also the first composer to indicate a range of dynamic differences in his scores. One of Gabrieli’s trademarks was to divide his parts into three “choirs” based on pitch ranges (high / medium / low). This made the application of chori spezzati all the more spectacular. (This technique can be clearly heard in the motet Salvator Noster.) The spacing of pitch-based groups of singers and brass-based instrumentalists around St Mark’s brought the text vividly off the page, and produced the exciting and dramatic contrasts which the Venetian worshippers craved, and which, incidentally, were about as far as it was possible to get from the contemporary music being served up at the Vatican by composers such as Palestrina, Lassus and Victoria.

Other prominent Venetian composers at this time, all on the payroll at St Mark’s, included Porta (1529-1601), Merulo (1553-1604) and Croce (1557-1609). Porta left behind a Magnificat in 24 parts which used violins, cornetts, trombones and portative organs. Cavalli’s publication in 1656, Musicae Sacrae, is the last significant publication of sacred music of the Venetian School by a Maestro di Cappella at St Mark’s. This publication includes a Messa Concertata – a mass setting which is fully in the concertato style for double choir, two violins and ripieno e altri instrumenti ad lib. This concept, born in Venice, of accompanying mass settings with instrumental parts which have a purpose of their own, and are not simply doubling voices, was to become a key element of Baroque music and is probably best exemplified in the Mass in B Minor by J. S. Bach (1685-1750), written fewer than one hundred years later in 1733, and ultimately in the classical Viennese mass settings of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven.

The Venetians were also leading the way in terms of extended instrumental music south of the Alps. The ricercars (essentially instrumental motets), canzonas, sonatas and toccatas of Andrea Gabrieli are significant. They frequently base the musical content on only one or two themes which are then inverted (played upside down), diminished (played in half note values), augmented (played in double note values) and drawn together in a stretto (played in quick succession), and sometimes played with an accompanying counter-melody. This gave the music cohesion and structure, and these compositional devices spread across northern Europe and influenced composers such as Sweelinck (1562-1621) and Buxtehude (1637-1707). They are exactly the same devices which we find Bach using, in a more sophisticated way, in his fugues and instrumental music about a century later. The ricercars of Merulo often alternate slow sombre passages with quasi improvisatory sections, whilst the canzonas, often based on an existing chanson melody, were generally simpler with less ornamentation and counterpoint. Giovanni Gabrieli published instrumental music for up to nineteen instruments, divided into antiphonal groups by pitch, and written in the same way as polychoral music.

In Rome the prima prattica style was perpetuated by pupils of Palestrina after his death, notably the Anerio brothers – Felicio (1560-1614) and Giovanni (1567-1630), Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652), and Giocomo Carissimi (1605-1674), all composers of the Sistine Chapel. Carissimi is particularly remembered for his contribution to the genre of Oratorio. This type of religious musical drama was popular in Rome, but it was a genre which clearly didn’t appeal to the Venetians, as there appear to be no Venetian oratorios, although, from the mid seventeenth century, plenty of operas.

The Venetian polychoral compositions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the advent of music publishing, are amongst the most important musical events in the history of European music, and their influence on musical practice in other countries was enormous. The compositional innovations introduced by the Venetian school, along with the contemporary development of monody and opera in Florence, together define the end of the musical Renaissance and the beginning of the musical Baroque.