title page, in proper church Latin, that additus est bassus continuus pro organo, in reality a basso
seguente; his first book of four-part Masses, published in 1596, was reissued in 1612 cum basso
generali pro organo, and so on.
Even older music was renovated in this way. Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, the prime
embodiment of the earlier, less musically radical phase of the Counter Reformation, and almost from the
moment of its creation a revered “classic,” was arranged in the early seventeenth century both as a
polychoral composition (for two four-part choirs) and as a continuo-accompanied one. Re-outfitting was
the price of currency; “authentic” performance practice for music in obsolete styles had to await the
advent of Romanticism, which had a strong nostalgic component and which despised the marketplace (at
least officially).
THE ART OF ORCHESTRATION IS BORN
Beyond the provision of an organ bass, none of the publications mentioned so far actually specified the
instrumentation for concerted compositions—or as perhaps we ought therefore to say, for concerted
performances. All the parts were furnished with text, none was “vocal” or “instrumental” to the exclusion
of the other possibility, so the assignment of voices and instruments to specific parts had to be made by
the director of the performance ad hoc (“for the nonce”). The first composer to furnish definite
specifications for his concerted works—in other words, the first composer to practice the art of
orchestration as we know it—was Andrea Gabrieli’s nephew and pupil Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1553–
1612), who took the post of second organist at St. Mark’s during the last year of his uncle’s life, and
stayed there for the rest of his own. It was Giovanni who edited Andrea’s sacred works for publication in
1587 and included a few concerti of his own. It was a genre in which he would surpass his uncle and,
through his own pupils, transform church music thoroughly, in the process dealing a body blow to the ars
perfecta, no less effective for its being unintended.
Besides the eleven concerted motets of his own that he published along with his uncle’s concerti, the
only volume of music Giovanni Gabrieli saw fit to publish during his lifetime was a book of what he
called Sacrae Symphoniae (Venice: Gardano, 1597)—“Sacred Symphonies,” here adapting the new
concerto idea of many-different-things-simultaneously-coordinated to an old word (first used, we may
recall from chapter 5, in the ninth-century Scolica Enchiriadis) with classy Greek roots that meant “things
sounding together in harmony,” or (to be equally classy in English) “sacred concinnities.” This was a
collection of double-choir motets plus a few for three or four choirs (and some instrumental pieces to be
described later), issued in twelve vocal part books (without even a special organ part; at least none
survives), but with a title page that calls for the concertato mixture of voices and instruments in
performance. So far he was perfecting his uncle’s style.
The second book of Sacrae Symphoniae, issued posthumously in 1615, was the epoch-maker. Its
contents cannot be precisely dated, but all the motets in it were presumably written after the date of the
first collection, fixing their termini at 1597–1612. The great departure (actually nothing more than making
explicit what was formerly implicit, but to spectacular effect) was the exact specification of the
performance medium, and the extremely contrastive exploitation of the diverse resources at the
composer’s disposal.
In ecclesiis benedicite Domino (“Bless the Lord in the congregations,” Ex. 18-13), probably
composed sometime after 1605, shows the younger Gabrieli at the height of his powers. There are fifteen
parts in all, deployed in three choirs plus an organ part that combines the roles of basso continuo and
basso seguente in what was customarily called the basso generale, the “general bass.” The three choirs