The ones for larger numbers are of course polychoral, deploying massed instruments—the first
orchestras, in a sense (though with only one player per part)—in antiphonal groups that answered one
another in the resonant interior space of the basilica. The ones for smaller ensembles are florid studies for
cornetto and violin virtuosos. As the title of the 1615 publication also shows, the word sonata was
gaining currency alongside canzona to designate the newly theatricalized instrumental genre. It did not
mean anything special as yet; like canzona, it was an abbreviation of the full name of the genre, canzona
per sonare. From canzona per sonare (“a song for playing”) came canzona sonata (“a played song”),
and then plain sonata—something “played.” The word sonata still means “something played,” of course,
but the thing in question has changed many times since Gabrieli’s time.
One of the items in the 1597 collection is called Sonata pian’e forte—“the piece played loud and
soft”—and has a big, not quite deserved, historical reputation going back to Carl von Winterfeld’s
Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (“Gabrieli and his time”), one of the earliest scholarly biographies
of any composer. The book was published in Berlin in 1834, when (despite its title) great composers
tended to be viewed in relative isolation from their times, and when their greatness was apt to be viewed
in somewhat anachronistic terms emphasizing innovation and originality—in other words, the traits by
which a nineteenth-century composer’s greatness was measured.