music has been dramatized. And it has been more thoroughly professionalized than ever before. From
now on, musical performers—whether in church, in aristocratic chambers, or in theaters (a new venue!)
—would be public figures on spectacular display. Anywhere that music was made by virtuosi became, in
effect, a theater.
That new dramatic element—music making a spectacle of itself—subsuming all the newfangled
expressive resources discovered by the madrigalists, the new mixtures of media contrived by the
“concertists,” and the new craving for mimesis (realistic representation) inspired by the “radical
humanists” whose acquaintance we are about to make, was the great conceptual innovation—the
“paradigm shift,” as historians of science would call it—lurking behind all the shocking stylistic novelties
that doomed the ars perfecta and gave rise to that aggressively exteriorized sensibility we now call
“baroque.”
“SONGS” FOR INSTRUMENTS
Even instrumental music was “dramatized” under the new dispensation, and here too the Gabrielis played
a decisive role. Ever since the publications of Attaingnant began circulating abroad, and even before,
Venetian organists had been fond of arranging racy “Parisian” chansons for their instrument and
performing them during services alongside the staider, motetlike ricercari with which we are already
familiar. (The first publication to include such pieces was a 1523 volume by Marco Antonio Cavazzoni,
an organist active both as player and as singer in several Venetian churches, including St. Mark’s.)
Andrea Gabrieli issued a whole book of Canzoni alla francese per sonar sopra stromenti da tasti
(“French-type songs for playing on keyboard instruments”) in 1571: it contains arrangements of chansons
by Janequin, Lasso, and others (see Ex. 18-14a). By the end of the century, however, the “canzona” (for
some reason turned into a feminine noun; the normal Italian word for “song” is canzone) had become an
independent instrumental genre more or less modeled on the style and structure of the chanson, even taking
over its typical “pseudodactylic” opening rhythm as a trademark. The earliest books of independent organ
canzonas were published by Claudio Merulo, a now retired organist who had once beaten the elder
Gabrieli out for the plum St. Mark’s post (see Ex. 18-14b).
EX. 18-14A Canzona incipit by Andrea GabrieliEX. 18-14B Canzona incipit by Claudio Merulo