performance, is by standard modern definition a “baroque” sonata. Its inclusion in a book of canzonas
testifies conclusively to the genealogy of what has been ever since the seventeenth century the principal
genre of soloistic chamber music—instrumental music for “pure” listening enjoyment. After four hundred
years, we take such a thing for granted. As we shall see, though, when it was new (and especially when it
began to travel beyond the borders of Italy) it raised some knotty esthetic problems. Putting this piece at
the end of our chapter on the effects of religious unrest underscores the irony: what would remain for
centuries the elite genre of “absolute” secular instrumental music was born in church.
EX. 18-18 Giovanni Gabrieli, Sonata per tre violini, end