The Ritus Patriarchinus was used in Venice from 1250. Throughout the Middle Ages various popes issued edicts that the Roman Rite was to be restored, but the Venetians simply ignored them and carried on. After the Council of Trent in 1570, under the papacy of Pope Pius V, various cities in north-east Italy, one after the other, did restore the Roman Rite (Trieste 1586, Udine 1596, Como 1597). Saint Mark’s, however, the old chapel of the Doge, resisted this until the republic fell in 1796 and the building eventually acquired cathedral status. So, for over five centuries the Procurators of St Mark’s held out against the pope, enabling the composers of the Venetian School to create a new type of music, the mixing of voices and instruments in church, a feature which was to define the approaching Baroque period.
Sacred Venetian Music
The Venetian musical style was all about grandeur and largesse. The foremost purpose of music during worship was the expression of the text and the overall effect of the music, which had to be impressive and dramatic. Whilst in Rome the a cappella style of Palestrina was deeply entrenched, during the sixteenth century the Venetians developed a love of orchestral colour. Instrumental music, in the form of sonatas, canzonas, balletos and ricercars, was regularly included in church services, with sonatas generally being more devotional in mood than canzonas. Giovanni Gabrieli included instrumental pieces in his Sacræ Symphoniæ Ioannis Gabrieli, a collection of sacred music which was published in Venice in 1597 - although it is interesting to note that Monteverdi, who wrote brilliantly for instruments, didn’t leave behind a single piece which is for instruments alone.
During the latter half of the sixteenth century Venice was still politically at odds with the papacy, and the progressive musical tradition at St Mark’s was not helping the situation. The Venetians appeared not to care about this: Sansovino, in his treatise Venetia, citta nobilissima, claims that “in Venice, music has her very home”. The austerity of Roman a cappella music made virtually no impact on the composers of the Venetian school. Andrea Gabrieli, a singer at St Mark’s from 1536 and organist from 1566, also a pupil of Willaert and uncle to Giovanni, makes it clear, in his preface for a publication of sacred music in 1563, that instruments and voices were to be used both separately and together - although he does not make it clear exactly how this should be done. All instrumental parts in these publications are underlaid with text, and so the instrumental players were essentially playing from vocal parts, and therefore following the phrasing and breathing of the singers – a practice which, in the interests of authenticity, is happening in this evening’s concert. We can assume that the combination of voices and instruments would have varied from one performance to the next: as long as the integrity of the text is not compromised and no part is missing this would have worked perfectly well. 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 includes music from his uncle Andrea, 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 sacred 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 open and dense textures. Giovanni Gabrieli was also the first composer to indicate a range of dynamic differences in his scores. One of Andrea Gabrieli’s trademarks was to divide his parts into three “choirs” based on pitch ranges (high/medium/low, or SSAA/SATB/ATBB). This made the application of chori spezzati (spaced choirs) all the more spectacular. The music of both Gabrieli and Monteverdi makes much use of this particular dramatic device which was, in part, inspired by the architecture of St Mark’s. Aware of the practical difficulties of getting singers who are spatially separated to sing together, the Venetians wrote music which was designed to allow different groups to sing in alternation – a concept known as antiphony. This device was peculiar to Venice and the many balconies, galleries, opposing elevated choir lofts and side chapels in the building allowed composers to place small and large groups of musicians around the building and to write antiphonally for them, using contrasting parts of the pitch spectrum, so that the sound would be coming from several different places within the building in a spatially separated and stereophonic way. (It is interesting to note that the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach was Kantor for twenty-seven years, also had opposing elevated choir lofts, although these no longer survive.) Many composers, including Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), came to Venice to learn from these eminent Venetian musicians, and soon the practice spread across Europe. 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.
