Giovanni Gabrieli

Standard music histories have long painted the attractive picture of Gabrieli at Saint Mark's so: his splendid music flies back and forth across the equally splendid nave of Venice's greatest church, from balcony to echoing balcony. Music scholars have come to dissociate Gabrieli's music from this context, but its polychoral splendor remains. Many of his best-known pieces not only contrast different vocal and instrumental textures, but also manifestly pit full choirs of sound one against the other. These choirs may not have been resounding from the East to the West and the North to the South. They may, in fact, have been placed relatively close together in the same balcony, or clustered near the altar of one of Venice's great confraternity halls such as the Scuola di San Rocco. In either location, a single conductor can properly control the music! Yet the magnificent effect of choir against choir still appears in both instrumental sonata and vocal and instrumental concerto, and in concerted motet. Gabrieli's 19-voiced motet Buccinate in neomenia tuba, published in 1597, offers a well-known example.

For a text, Gabrieli went outside the Catholic liturgy (a feature that may have been quite common in proud Renaissance Venice). Instead, he knitted together a jubilant patchwork of quotations from the Psalms: Ps. 80:4, 97:6b, 80:2b, 150:4, and 97:4b, with other lines inserted to assure an exultant flow of praise. The chosen verses ring with the sound of trumpets, organs, harps, and timpani, and could be appropriate for any high festival occasion, perhaps even a mixed civic and sacred celebration such as a coronation, or Venice's annual symbolic Marriage Ceremony of city and sea. Gabrieli chooses a wide sonic palette with which to evoke these images: fully four "choirs" of instruments and voices, two higher and two lower. Instrumental participation is assured by the 19th fundamental bass voice, for which an organ is specified, and by the profound bass notes specified for two of the choirs. Throughout, the composer flashes back and forth between choirs like a fireworks display, never missing an opportunity to increase the musical jubilation such as the syncopated "alleluia" passages that pass through all choirs three times. In addition, he inserts subtle but witty reflections of the various praising instruments into the music itself: an opening fanfare-like "trumpet" motive, a restriction to higher parts at a later mention of the trumpet, greater agility for the strings, and sudden profundity for the drums.