Giovanni Gabrieli

Giovanni Gabrieli (1553–1556? – August 12, 1612) was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque style.

Music and style

Though Gabrieli composed in many of the forms current at the time, he clearly preferred sacred vocal and instrumental music. All of his secular vocal music is relatively early; late in his career he concentrated on sacred vocal and instrumental music that exploited sonority for maximum effect.

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Like composers before and after him, he would use the unusual layout of the San Marco church, with its two choir lofts facing each other, to create striking spatial effects. Most of his pieces are written so that a choir or instrumental group will first be heard from the left, followed by a response from the musicians to the right (antiphon). While this polychoral style had been extant for decades—possibly Adrian Willaert was the first to make use of it, at least in Venice—Gabrieli was the first to use carefully determined groups of instruments and singers, with precise directions for instrumentation, and in more than two groups. The acoustics were such in the church—and they have changed little in four hundred years—that instruments, correctly positioned, could be heard with perfect clarity at distant points. Thus instrumentation which looks strange on paper, for instance a single string player versus a large group of brass instruments, can be made to sound, in San Marco, in perfect balance.

Related Topics:
Choir - Antiphon - Polychoral - Adrian Willaert

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Gabrieli was original not only in his use of instrumentation, but in his development of dynamic markings. His Sonata pian e forte is possibly the earliest piece to use dynamics; certainly it is the earliest influential piece to do so. In addition, he was one of the first composers to use basso continuo, a technique popularized in a 1602 musical collection by Viadana.

Related Topics:
Dynamic - Basso continuo - 1602 - Viadana

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