are of distinctive, mutually exclusive, composition. There are four parts (SATB) labeled cappella,
standing for the chorus; there are four parts (SATB) labeled voce, standing for vocal soloists; and there
are six parts assigned to specific instruments—three cornetti on top, two trombones at the bottom, and a
violino (then a new instrument, making an early appearance in notated music) in the middle, its range
suggesting that it was of a size more like that of a modern viola than what has subsequently been
standardized as the violin we now know. The vocal and instrumental parts are distinguished both in style
and in function; but so are the choral and solo parts within the vocal contingent. The soloists’ parts have a
great deal of written out embellishment that again probably reflects what was previously the unwritten
(“oral” or “improvisatory”) norm. Even in bald verbal description the piece makes a vivid impression;
but comparing what follows to a recording or a complete score will help.
In ecclesiis begins more or less like a Viadana solo “concerto,” with a single soprano voice
supported by an independent organ (continuo) line. In the score as given in Ex. 18-13, the right hand of
the organ part is “realized” by an editor for the benefit of modern musicians who are even more the
victims of their literacy—i.e., wholly dependent on what is fixed in writing—than those in Gabrieli’s
time, when printed music books had been available for only a century. The chorus enters as if in response
at Alleluia, its music contrasting in every conceivable way with that of the soloist: in texture, in its
homorhythmic relationship with the bass, and (most strikingly of all) in its dancelike triple meter. The
soprano soloist, meanwhile, sings in alternation with the chorus, emphasizing the ancient responsorial
effect and showing its relationship to the novel concertato style.
But even more basic to the concertato idea, and its truly subversive aspect from the standpoint of the
ars perfecta, is its emphasis on short-range contrast rather than long-range continuity (recall old Jacques
Buus from chapter 15 and his ten-mile ricercari!). And also indicative of the new style’s incompatibility
with old ideals is the “general pause”—the rest in all parts—that comes before the choral metric shift and
cadence in m. 10. It is not only a rhetorical pause but a pragmatic concession to the reverberent enclosed
space that is receiving and reflecting Gabrieli’s sonic overload. The grand pauses are there to let the echo
clear—an echo that at St. Mark’s lasts a good six seconds (as one can learn from “on location”
recordings) when the music is on the elephantine scale of a “sacred symphony.” Next the bass soloist
sings another little “concerto” to the bare organ’s support—and now the chorus is back with another
Alleluia in response. But whereas the bass’s music differed from the soprano’s, the chorus’s responses
are both the same. The Alleluias, in other words, are acting as refrains, or, to use the newer word
Gabrieli would have used, as ritornelli. The use of a ritornello, a recurrent musical strain, is as endemic
to the concertato style as the use of a basso continuo. Where the one unifies—or, perhaps better, anchors
—the unprecedentedly heterogeneous texture, the other anchors the unprecedentedly heterogeneous
sequence of events.
EX. 18-13 Giovanni Gabrieli, In ecclesiis (Sacrae Symphoniae, Book II) mm. 1–12