VENETIAN MUSIC – STUDIES

General editors
David Bryant, Luigi Collarile

Editorial board
Rodolfo Baroncini, Anna Laura Bellina, Lorenzo Bianconi, Maria Ida Biggi, Alessandro Borin,
Paolo Cecchi, Franco Colussi, Paolo Dal Molin, Angela Ida De Benedictis, Marco Di Pasquale,
Sergio Durante, Paolo Fabbri, David Fallows, Iain Fenlon, Helen Geyer, Beth Glixon, Jonathan Glixon,
Adriana Guarnieri, Jeffrey Kurtzman, Sabine Meine, Matteo Nanni, Michel Noiray, Maurizio Padoan,
Elena Quaranta, Ellen Rosand, Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Carlida Steffan, Joachim Steinheuer, Michael
Talbot, Claudia Vincis, John Whenham, Luca Zoppelli

Venetian Music – Studies accepts contributions in all the major European languages.
Guidelines for author submissions:
www.vmo.unive.it/Studies (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
 Giovanni Gabrieli
Transmission and Reception
of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by
Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant, Luigi Collarile

F
© 2016, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.

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 Contents

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile

I. THE COMPOSER’S LEGACY

GABRIELI AS MODEL
1. ‘Et per tale confirmato dall’auttorità del signor Giovanni Gabrieli’. The Reception of
Gabrieli as a Model by Venetian and Non-Venetian Composers of the New Generation
(1600–1620). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Rodolfo Baroncini

2. Giovanni Battista Riccio’s Canzonas in the Light of his Borrowings from

Giovanni Gabrieli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Marco Di Pasquale

3. Echoes of Giovanni Gabrieli’s Style in the Territories Between Koper and Graz in
the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Metoda Kokole

II. SOURCE STUDIES

TRANSMISSION AND INTERPRETATION
OF THE WRITTEN MUSIC
4. Giovanni Gabrieli and Andrea’s Musical Legacy. Lost Editions, Ghost Editions,
Editorial Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Luigi Collarile

5. Written and Unwritten Practices in the Tradition of Cori Spezzati. Gabrieli’s

Contribution in Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
David Bryant and Elena Quaranta

6. Cleffing, Ranges, Pitch and Sonority in the Vocal Music of Andrea and Giovanni
Gabrieli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Jeffrey Kurtzman

V
 7. ‘Scritte nella mente’? Giovanni Gabrieli’s Keyboard Music and the Art of Improvised
Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Stefano Lorenzetti

III. ORGANS AND ORGANISTS

8. Students, Rivals and Contemporaries. Organists in Venetian Churches at the Time of

Giovanni Gabrieli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Jonathan Glixon

9. Organs, Lofts and Spaces for Music in Venetian Churches at the Time of
Giovanni Gabrieli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Massimo Bisson

IV. THE COMPOSER’S LEGACY

NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY REVIVAL
AND REVISITATIONS
10. On the Performance of Giovanni Gabrieli’s Instrumental Ensemble Music . . . . . . . . . . 195
Philippe Canguilhem

11. Constructing Images. Giovanni Gabrieli and the Uses of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Iain Fenlon

12. Giovanni Gabrieli and the New Venetian School (Malipiero, Maderna, Nono) . . . . . . . 219
Paolo Dal Molin, Michele Chiappini and Francisco Rocca

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

VI CONTENTS
 —1—
‘Et per tale confirmato dall’auttorità del signor Giovanni Gabrieli’.
The Reception of Gabrieli as a Model by Venetian
and Non-Venetian Composers of the New Generation (1600–1620)
Rodolfo Baroncini

Gabrieli’s influence on the younger generations of musicians in Venice and the Italian
peninsula, little studied in comparison with his legacy in northern Europe, is here discussed
on the basis of contemporary assessments of his reputation and prestige, and tangible traces of
his musical output in the works of younger composers. A total of 96 citations and paraphrases
of sacred, secular and instrumental compositions by Gabrieli are identified in the surviving
production of 34 authors. Stylistic characteristics and structural procedures are also analysed
(though with caution, given the widespread dissemination of clichés in the context of the
vast and indeterminate area of casual intertextuality). This new perspective demonstrates the
importance of Gabrieli’s legacy in his native lands.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

B
y 1613 Giovanni Gabrieli was already being forgotten in Venice. [...] Only in Germany,
where his life as composer had started, was Gabrieli’s name kept alive, largely because
his pupils could never forget him. In Venice his name occasionally appears in the list of
organists of St. Mark’s when a writer of a guide book wishes to extol the virtues of the basilica’s
musical history. There is no sign that his music was ever performed there again.1

Thus Denis Arnold, towards the end of his important monograph on Gabrieli, comments the composer’s
legacy and posthumous reputation. In his opinion, Gabrieli’s influence on young Venetian composers and
their music during the first two decades of the seventeenth century was decidedly short-lived. To explain this
apparent eclipse, he cites the speedy changes at work in contemporary musical language and, in particular, the
ever-increasing vogue for the new repertories involving small, polarized forces (one, two or three voices with

* The present article represents a kind of final chapter to my recent monograph on Giovanni Gabrieli (Baroncini,
Giovanni Gabrieli). This accounts for the frequent references to the volume, for which I beg the reader’s understanding.
Gabrieli’s compositions are here identified with reference to Charteris’s thematic catalogue (Charteris, Giovanni
Gabrieli). Abbreviations: A-Wn = Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; D-B = Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin –
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; D-Kl = Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek, Kassel; D-Rp = Bischöfliche
Zentralbibliothek, Proskesche Musikabteilung, Regensburg; F-Pn = Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; GB-Lbl =
British Library, London; I-PCd = Biblioteca e Archivio Capitolare, Piacenza; I-Tn = Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria,
Turin; I-Vas = Archivio di Stato, Venice; PL-PE = Wyższe Seminarium Duchowne Diecezji Pelplińskiej, Pelplin; SI-Lnr
= Narodna in Univerzitetna Knjižnica, Rokopisna Zbirka, Ljubljana.
1. Arnold, Giovanni Gabrieli, pp. 295–296.

5
 —2—
Giovanni Battista Riccio’s Canzonas
in the Light of his Borrowings from Giovanni Gabrieli
Marco Di Pasquale

Among the earliest Venetian examples of canzoni da sonar conceived for small groups of
performers are the instrumental works which Giovanni Battista Riccio (1563–after 1620)
included in his three books of Divine lodi (Venice, before 1612–1620). While these
pieces demonstrate their composer’s awareness of the most recent stylistic and functional
developments in instrumental music for devotional and ecclesiastical use, equally evident is
Riccio’s predilection for models created by Giovanni Gabrieli. Nine of Riccio’s twenty-one
surviving instrumental compositions cite the opening subjects of canzonas by Gabrieli; yet
another is a fully-fledged paraphrase of Gabrieli’s eight-part Canzon noni toni a 8 (C173).

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

S
cholars have frequently observed the importance of Giovanni Gabrieli as a point of reference and source
of inspiration for composers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both in Italy and
elsewhere in Europe. An astonishing number of contemporary works do, indeed, reveal the influence
of the Venetian master.1
The relationships of those pieces with their parent works vary considerably. Some merely incorporate,
or allude to, a detail (e.g., a motif or point of imitation). Others are more extensively modelled on their
sources in terms of shape and/or use of compositional devices, though not necessarily with direct citation of
materials (I refer to the use of modelling ‘to imitate a particularly successful or exemplary work’).2 Still others
are veritable paraphrases or parodies of a madrigal, motet or canzona by Gabrieli. Parody is here defined
etymologically, without ironic or satirical connotations; it denotes the systematic re-use of materials from
pre-existing works, whether or not with change of genre (as can also occur in paraphrase) or performing
medium.

* Abbreviations: F-Pn = Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; I-Tn = Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, Turin; I-Vas =
Archivio di Stato, Venice; I-Vasp = Archivio Storico del Patriarcato, Venice.
1. The most exhaustive study of this phenomenon is Baroncini, Et per tale confirmato, which greatly expands upon the data
presented in Charteris, Giovanni Gabrieli, passim.
2. This and other meanings of the term are described in Burkholder, Modelling.

33
 —3—
Echoes of Giovanni Gabrieli’s Style in the Territories between
Koper and Graz in the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century
Metoda Kokole

Giovanni Gabrieli’s influence is evident in the work of composers active in the territories
between Koper and Graz during the first decades of the seventeenth century, though little
music by the Venetian composer has survived in loco or is mentioned in historical inventories
or other documents. Music by Gabrieli is cited in monodic motets by Gabriello Puliti, organist
at Koper Cathedral from c. 1614 to 1624; Isaac Posch, active in Klagenfurt and Ljubljana
from 1614 to 1622–1623, includes a paraphrase of a motet by Giovanni Gabrieli in his
Harmonia concertans (Nuremberg, 1623). Posch’s output reflects the culture of the Italianate
court chapel of Graz, where Giovanni Priuli, Giovanni Valentini and Alessandro Tadei, all
pupils or disciples of Gabrieli, were employed. Also discussed in this paper are Raimundo
Ballestra and Lambert de Sayve.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

I
n order to gain a better understanding of how and to what extant Giovanni Gabrieli’s music reached and
influenced musical life in the territories between Koper (Capodistria) and Graz in the opening decades
of the seventeenth century, I will first try to clarify the geo-political and, consequently, cultural situation
of the area under discussion. I will then attempt to follow the extant traces of Giovanni Gabrieli’s music
and the contemporary reception of his works and style as a prelude to the central part of my discussion, an
examination of the local production of sacred music with special regard for the possible reception of aspects
of Gabrieli’s style and, in general, the composer’s legacy in this ethnically colourful and culturally transitional
geographical area.
Leaving aside the Venetian dominions in Istria, the territory of present-day Slovenia formed part of the
Habsburg hereditary lands of Inner Austria, whose political and administrative centre was the Styrian capital
of Graz.1 In 1564, Archduke Karl took up residence in the town, where he established his court and founded
one of the foremost musical chapels in Europe. His marriage in 1571 to Princess Maria Anna of Bavaria
(daughter of Albrecht V), likewise a music lover and reportedly a student of the Munich court Kapellmeister
* Abbreviations: A-Wn = Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; D-Rp = Bischöfliche Zentralbibliothek, Proske-
Musikbibliothek, Regensburg; I-Fn = Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence; I-Vas = Archivio di Stato, Venice;
SI-Lng = Narodna in Univerzitetna Knjižnica, Glasbena Zbirka, Ljubljana; SI-Lnr = Narodna in Univerzitetna Knjižnica,
Rokopisna Zbirka, Ljubljana.
1. The general political and cultural situation in the region – as viewed through the eyes of Slovenian historians – is discussed
in a multi-authored concise history of Slovenia (especially in the two historically overlapping chapters From Humanism to
Reformation and From Counter-Reformation Rigor to Baroque Exuberance): Luthar, The Land, pp. 193–228. For a general
English-language survey of local music history at this time, cf. relevant sections in Kokole, Baroque Music, pp. 429–434
(notes on pp. 606–609). The fundamental Slovenian-language reference books are Höfler, Glasbena umetnost; and
Cvetko, Slovenska glasba, pp. 41–108.

51
 —4—
Giovanni Gabrieli and Andrea’s Musical Legacy.
Lost Editions, Ghost Editions, Editorial Strategies
Luigi Collarile

This paper investigates Giovanni Gabrieli’s role in the posthumous publication of his uncle’s
music, a wide-ranging editorial project comprising eleven first editions of polyphonic music
and eight reprints (several of them revised). Lost editions and ghost editions are examined in
an attempt to establish the exact entity and chronology of the two Gabrielis’ printed output.
The objectives and strategies of the posthumous production are reconsidered in this revised
perspective.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

In dedicating the Concerti di Andrea, et di Gio. Gabrieli (1587) to Jakob Fugger, Giovanni states:
[…] since [Andrea] made me heir to both his external and internal legacy (besides his musical
teachings), he [also] bequeathed me that particular, affectionate devotion that he held for your
most illustrious lordship.1
No copies of Andrea Gabrieli’s last will and testament have come to light.2 Giovanni’s declaration nevertheless
confirms the importance of what, for him, was evidently a material and spiritual inheritance. While the
precise nature of Andrea’s ‘internal legacy’ is difficult to ascertain, some aspects of his ‘external legacy’ are
theoretically more accessible. As probable executor of Andrea’s last will, Giovanni initiates a wide-ranging
and, from various standpoints, outstanding project of posthumous musical editions, presumably based on a
series of more or less complete autographs. This project provides the focus for the present study.
Even the most recent historiographical literature tends, in certain cases, to devote only superficial
attention to Giovanni’s role in the initiative, laconically recording the principal stages of an editorial project
which evolves in a kind of limbo, suspended between the different artistic worlds of the two musicians.3
I here intend to focus on three different issues:
a) the possible existence of lost (and ghost) editions;
b) on the basis of the preserved editions, the place of Andrea’s and Giovanni’s publications in the context of
Angelo Gardano’s editorial programme;
c) Giovanni’s role in the posthumous publication of Andrea’s music.

* I am indebted to David Bryant and Rodolfo Baroncini for the many interesting discussions leading to the completion of this
article. Abbreviations: I-Bc = Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, Bologna; I-Vsm = Archivio della Procuratoria
di San Marco, Venice; PL-Kj = Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Krakow.
1. Gabrieli A./G., Concerti: ‘[...] si come [Andrea] lasciò me herede de suoi beni esterni, cosi de’ beni interni (oltre gli amaestramenti
della Musica) mi lasciò quella particolar affettuosa deuotione ch’esso portaua à V. S. Illustrissima’. For a complete transcription
of the dedication, Bryant – Morell, Andrea Gabrieli, p. 72; and Baroncini, Giovanni Gabrieli, pp. 569–570.
2.. Morell, New Evidence, pp. 109–110. Andrea’s oral will was probated by the Giudici dell’Esaminador before 9 January 1586.
3. Edwards, Becoming Magnificent, p. 358.

71
 —5—
Written and Unwritten Practices in the Tradition of Cori Spezzati.
Gabrieli’s Contribution in Context
David Bryant and Elena Quaranta

Though double- and multi-choir music as compositional practice and Giovanni Gabrieli’s
personal contribution to the repertoire have long attracted the attention of musicologists,
relatively little is known about cori spezzati as sound, above all in the contexts of music-
making in minor churches and the often obscure relationship between compositional style
and the potentially multiple locations, functions and economics of performances. The
present contribution looks at unwritten practices in the tradition of cori spezzati in Venice
and elsewhere on the Italian peninsula with the aim of placing the written contributions by
Gabrieli and others in a broader historical perspective which takes account of the real sounds
of music in everyday performance.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

A question of method
This essay is a sequel to our previous study Bryant – Quaranta, Traditions and Practices, with which it shares
the following historiographical premises and aspects of methodology:
– A view of medieval and Renaissance church polyphony based essentially on the idea of tradition and
continuity in the context of a widespread and daily use of the repertories and widely accepted performance
practices. This sense of continuity in the quotidian emerges from the combined musical activities of the many
minor institutions (parish and monastic churches, guilds and confraternities). The routine work of the small
cappelle musicali employed by the richest churches and confraternities of even small Italian cities (presumably,
on Sundays and the major festivities of the universal church calendar) intersects with the endless and thus, in
the final analysis, routine succession of important festivities in individual churches (those of the patron saints
of churches, guilds and confraternities, the founders and patron saints of monastic orders, the dedications
of churches; in some churches, Christmas and Easter were similarly celebrated, and musical activity also
increased – sometimes significantly – during Advent and Lent) to provide what, in the bigger cities at least,
was a constant supply of engagements for singers and instrumentalists.1 The recurrence of essentially similar
events, day after day and (in accordance with the liturgical cycle) year after year, favours the standardization
and perpetuation of widely accepted musical practices and leaves little room for anything but the most
gradual change.
– The potentially non-representative status of music-making in special institutions such as court chapels (for
example, the Venetian ducal chapel of St Mark’s), cathedrals and major sanctuaries, which themselves stand

1. On this theme cf., in particular, the various contributions in Produzione, circolazione e consumo.

97
 —6—
Cleffing, Ranges, Pitch and Sonority
in the Vocal Music of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli
Jeffrey Kurtzman

In the Renaissance, the standard combinations of normal clefs and high clefs denoted
performance at notated pitch and performance at transposed pitch, normally a fourth lower.
But the massed sonorities in the vocal music of Giovanni Gabrieli (and his uncle Andrea)
required other combinations of clefs, including the simultaneous use of both normal and
high clef combinations. This paper explores the relationship between these clef combinations,
performance pitch, and the use of instruments both doubling and substituting for apparently
vocal parts in the music of the Gabrielis, in an attempt to illustrate the likely meaning of the
notation and the intended sonorities in performance.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

S
ound is the alpha and omega of music – its initial purpose and its phenomenology. One of the principal
goals of musicology is to establish the criteria necessary to resurrect in modern performance the
phenomenological sound of music as it was heard at the time of its creation and contemporaneous use.
Musicology and modern performers have achieved this objective only in part. The refurbishing of old
instruments and the construction of modern versions based on detailed measurements of surviving examples
have given us what is probably a good approximation of the instrumental sounds of the period of Andrea and
Giovanni Gabrieli. However, we are much further away from reproducing the vocal sound of their age and
of their music. On the one hand, we are, of course, unwilling to produce the castrati that were so valued in
both secular and church cappelle in the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth
century. On the other hand, the modern sociology of choirs most often substitutes female voices for the boys,
falsettists and countertenors that, apart from castrati, would have sung the upper parts of the music of the
Church.
Another factor in the sound of music is its pitch level. Modern research has confirmed that there is a
relationship between notation, pitch and sonority in the Gabrieli period that affects the quality of that sound
profoundly. Composers of this period notated their vocal music primarily in two different clef systems. The
so-called standard clefs are the C1, C3, C4 and F4 clefs in which notated a' was at what Italian musicians
called tutto punto, approximately the same as a modern-day a'.1 The other clefs are the so-called chiavi alte, the
high clefs, later dubbed chiavette, comprising the G2, C2, C3 and C4 or F3 clefs, in which voice ranges were

* My warmest thanks go to Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile for the long discussions leading to the
completion of this article.
1. For a discussion of vocal vs. instrumental pitch in Venice and northern Italy in this period, see Haynes, A History,
pp. 58–69. The matter of sounding pitch is complicated by the tuning of accompanying organs as well as wind instruments.
Transposition to accommodate the choir was common for instruments. Wind players could use crooks to adjust their pitch
as necessary. The complexity of the subject makes detailed discussion impossible in the present context.

107
 —7—
‘Scritte nella mente’?
Giovanni Gabrieli’s Keyboard Music
and the Art of Improvised Composition
Stefano Lorenzetti

Gabrieli’s few surviving keyboard compositions are contained in a handful of miscellaneous

prints and manuscript anthologies. This fact seems strangely at odds with the apparently
continuous relationship between the musician and his instrument over 27 years of service
at St Mark’s. On the basis of a detailed analysis of what was typically required of church
organists in the sixteenth century, this paper asks what traces of improvised composition can be
detected in contemporary written composition. The organist’s assimilation of rigidly formalized
procedures unites the compositional and practical dimensions in a single, unified process,
governed by the horizons of perception.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

G
iovanni Gabrieli was active as an organist for his entire career, initially (1575–1579) at the Munich
court of Albrecht V, duke of Bavaria, where Orlando di Lasso was maestro di cappella, later (beginning
in 1585) in Venice as organist of St Mark’s and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.
Historians necessarily interpret these biographical facts as a sign of vocation. Yet the apparently
continuous relationship between the musician and his instrument seems strangely at odds with what the
written sources have to tell us about Gabrieli’s production for keyboard. Richard Charteris attributes a mere
36 compositions to Gabrieli with some degree of certainty.1 The limited size of the repertoire combines with
an editorial strategy which differs markedly, for example, from that of Gabrieli’s predecessor at St Mark’s,
Claudio Merulo.2 Few compositions indeed appeared in printed form: the intonazioni (C240–250) of 1593,3
two ricercars (C215–216) in 1595,4 two canzonas (C230 and C235) in 16175 and a toccata (C236) in
Diruta’s Il Transilvano of 1593.6 Most of what little has survived (ten ricercars, four canzonas, three toccatas,
two fugues, a fantasia) is preserved in various manuscript anthologies posthumously compiled by Giovanni’s
German admirers. In the light of the composer’s 27 years as organist at St Mark’s, it is difficult to imagine

* Abbreviations: F-Pn = Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; GB-Ob = Bodleian Library, Oxford; I-Vas = Archivio di
Stato, Venice.
1. Among Richard Charteris’s many studies of Giovanni Gabrieli’s keyboard music cf., in particular, Charteris, A New Keyboard
Work.
2. On Merulo’s editorial activity see Edwards, Claudio Merulo; and Collarile, Considerazioni.
3. Gabrieli A./G., Intonationi; compositions attributed to Andrea in the reprint of 1607 (RISM 160729).
4. Gabrieli A./G., Ricercari II.
5. Posthumously published in Nova musices organicae tabulatura.
6. Diruta, Il Transilvano, reprinted in RISM 159725, 161217 and 162511.

135
 —8—
Students, Rivals and Contemporaries.
Organists in Venetian Churches at the Time of Giovanni Gabrieli
Jonathan Glixon

Giovanni Gabrieli has long been noted for the number and quality of musicians who claimed
him as a teacher. Best known, perhaps, are those from northern Europe, including Schütz
and several from Denmark. We know far less about his Venetian students. In fact, there is
little evidence at all for the establishment of a Gabrieli school of organists in Venice, despite
the long and prominent service of Andrea and Giovanni both at San Marco and elsewhere,
Giovanni’s renown as a teacher and the sheer number of churches employing organists. This
paper examines the documentary evidence regarding organists in Venetian churches and
confraternities at the end of the sixteenth century and the first few decades of the seventeenth.
Some organists can be identified as students of Gabrieli, but others come from quite different
backgrounds (and many, of course, are nothing but names). It also discusses organists’ duties
in Venetian churches during the period 1580–1630.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

W
as there a Gabrieli school of organists in Venice? Three simple facts would lead one to guess that
the answer to this question should be ‘yes’: 1) Giovanni Gabrieli was one of the most prominent
organists in Venice for nearly thirty years; 2) Gabrieli was renowned as a teacher;1 and 3) there
were a large number of churches in Venice, and just about all of them had an organ and employed an
organist. As it turns out, traces of the intersection of these three factors in the extant documentation are
rather few and far between. Therefore, only a portion of this paper will deal directly with the issue I posed –
whether there was a Gabrieli school of organists in Venice; I will complement this with a discussion of other
aspects of the employment of organists in Venetian churches during the fifty-year period from 1580 to 1630.
Now, back to the three factors with which I began this paper, in particular, the third one: the large
number of churches and organs in Venice around 1600. In Table 1, I summarize the information provided
in Giovanni Stringa’s 1604 revision of Francesco Sansovino’s Venetia città nobilissima. Each of the chapters
devoted to the sestieri concludes with an accounting of the numbers of churches and other items of interest.
As can be seen, numbers are given for parish churches, churches of nuns, and churches of monks and friars.
My chart also shows the total figures: seventy parish churches, thirty-eight churches of frati, and twenty-nine
churches of monache, for a total of 137. Organs in the city are also counted, in the number of 143. To these
numbers, we can add those for churches in the diocese of Torcello, including also Murano and Burano,
providing a grand total of seventy-seven parishes, forty-three monastic churches, and forty-seven nunneries,
making 167 in all. The estimated number of organs would then be about 170.
Nearly all of these churches employed, in some manner, an organist, although very few as what we would
describe today as full-time. It is unclear whether a single organist could serve more than one church, since

1. On Gabrieli as a teacher, see Arnold, Giovanni Gabrieli, pp. 211–230; Edwards, Becoming Magnificent, pp. 371–372; and
Baroncini, Giovanni Gabrieli, pp. 174–187.

151
 —9—
Organs, Lofts and Spaces for Music in Venetian Churches
at the Time of Giovanni Gabrieli
Massimo Bisson

Venetian organs of the second half of the sixteenth century and early Seicento largely
maintained the specifications of early Renaissance instruments, of which the organs of the
ducal basilica were undisputed models. On occasion, however, innovations such as reeds and
modern accessories amplified the range of available sound in ways that defy modern concepts
of historical performance practice. Placement of instruments shows increasing independence
from the choir. Though the organ is increasingly involved in performance practices requiring
voices and other instruments, contemporary lofts remain small indeed. Pictorial and
architectural ornamentation of organ cases and lofts becomes more complex.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

T
he theme of organ building in Renaissance Venice still requires considerable study. Material evidence
is almost entirely lacking (even the famous organ of Valvasone in Friuli is only partially extant:
see Fig. 6), and archival research has hitherto yielded no more than some twenty specifications –
few indeed when one considers that around two hundred instruments existed in Venice and its immediate
surroundings at the time of Giovanni Gabrieli.1 What data has been retrieved over the last decade shows that
organ production was thriving in the second half of the sixteenth century. It can no longer be maintained
that the Venetian organ conserved identical features throughout the Renaissance and right into the Baroque
era. Documents (primarily construction contracts), however, provide little information beyond lists of stops
and indications of keyboard extension. Pedals are never mentioned, though they presumably featured in
most if not all instruments (without independent stops). At St Mark’s, the celebrated organ in cornu Evangelii
(see Fig. 3), built by Maestro Urbano between 1488 and 1490, is known to have possessed pedals.2
As recently shown by Pier Paolo Donati with particular reference to Vincenzo Colombi (perhaps the
most important organ builder active in mid sixteenth-century Venice), the main requisites for sixteenth-
century organs were the same in Venice as elsewhere in Italy: a sweet, crystalline sound, proportional to the
size of the building, emitted immediately on depression of the key. Donati has also shown that pursuit of an
increasingly melodious sound led to progressively wider pipe diameters and narrower mouths.3

* Abbreviations: I-Vas = Archivio di Stato, Venice; I-Vasp = Archivio Storico del Patriarcato, Venice.
1. Bisson, Meravigliose macchine, pp. 19–21, 25–29.
2. Maestro Urbano has recently been identified as Urbano Spiera (cf. Vio, Le confraternite, pp. 249–250, and, for more detailed
information, Vio – Stella, Documenti VIII, pp. 30–33, note 52, and Bisson, Meravigliose macchine, pp. 72–73, note 35).
3. Donati, Nota, pp. 202–208.

165
 — 10 —
On the Performance of Giovanni Gabrieli’s
Instrumental Ensemble Music
Philippe Canguilhem

Giovanni Gabrieli’s canzonas and sonatas are frequently regarded as the most representative
aspect of his artistic personality, no less original and innovative than his great polychoral
motets in their sumptuous combination of cornetts and trombones in spatially separated
choirs. This paper sets out to trace the origins and progressive definition of the sound of
Gabrieli’s instrumental music in twentieth-century interpretations on the basis of what, at the
outset, was an undoubtedly limited knowledge of the sources. It shows how consideration of
a wider range of documentary and other non-musical sources can open up new horizons for
historically-informed interpretation of this repertoire.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

Deconstructing the Gabrieli Sound

Four centuries after his death, Gabrieli’s music reaches us primarily as sound. The Gabrieli Sound, so
specific and so intimately associated with the composer’s use of instruments (both alone and together with
voices), can be defined as large, deep and generous, thanks to the combination of two particular wind
instruments – cornetts and sackbutts – with the organ. This nucleus is sometimes expanded by the use of
one or two violins or, less frequently, a bassoon. But, in most cases, Gabrieli’s music is characterized by the
idea of brass instruments. Whether or not authentic instruments are employed, the sound of brass with
organ accompaniment embodies Giovanni’s musical personality, his per-sona, for the modern listener. In
the (then) complete list of recordings included by Richard Charteris in his thematic catalogue of 1996, the
table of individual compositions shows to what extent the instrumental music had taken precedence over the
motets.1 And there is no reason for believing that the situation has changed significantly in recent decades:
to this day, a number of motets have never been recorded. In this way, Gabrieli’s canzoni da sonar have
contributed significantly to the composer’s decidedly sound-oriented profile in the twentieth century. As a
matter of fact, the overwhelming majority of recordings of canzoni da sonar released both before and after
1996 use a brass-based ensemble.
My attempts to understand the modern origins of this profile led me to a twentieth-century American
musician of key importance in the matter: Robert King (1914–1999). Primarily a euphonium player,

* The first portion of this article has benefited from fruitful conversations with Jean-Pierre Mathieu and Jean-Pierre Canihac,
to whom go my warmest thanks. Abbreviations: D-As = Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, Augsburg; F-Pn = Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, Paris; I-Vnm = Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.
1. Charteris, Giovanni Gabrieli, pp. 464–465. A large number of motets had not been recorded in 1996, whereas the canzonas
had been the subject of at least three different recordings. Some canzonas (C172, C175 and C186) were available in over
forty different recordings.

195
 — 11 —
Constructing Images.
Giovanni Gabrieli and the Uses of History
Iain Fenlon

Giovanni Gabrieli is just one example (Monteverdi is another) of an early modern composer
whose music, having disappeared from view within some decades from his death, was then
recuperated by musicologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As is always true of
such cases, Gabrieli and his music were not recovered by accident, but rather as the result of
specific ideological and aesthetic imperatives. This paper attempts to uncover the motives
and preoccupations of those who contributed to the construction of an image not merely
of Gabrieli himself but also of the place of music in Venetian culture and society during the
period.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

T
he reception history of Giovanni Gabrieli’s music is more complicated than might at first appear,
being divisible into two distinct initial phases, the one German the other Italian that, while
obviously related, flowed from quite different ideological motivations. As long ago as 1834,
Carl von Winterfeld, a Prussian aristocrat with an amateur enthusiasm for music, categorized the sacred
music of the then comparatively unknown composer as archetypically Venetian, wedded to the life of the
Republic and expressed through its civic and religious rituals centred on the Basilica of San Marco.1 For
him, Gabrieli’s music, and particularly the large-scale pieces which he set about transcribing into modern
score from manuscripts and printed sources,2 represented a very specific and geographically circumscribed
phenomenon.3 The major outcome of Winterfeld’s researches, embodied in what is the first monograph
devoted to Gabrieli’s life and work, and for its time a major work of historical scholarship, has largely set the
style and content of much subsequent writing on the subject.4 In this context it is relevant that Gabrieli’s
sacred music, and in particular the large-scale motets, were performed in both Catholic and Protestant
contexts north of the Alps long after they had ceased to be current in Italy, and as such formed a significant
component of the German tradition. The strength of its impact there is immediately evident from the
number of editions containing Gabrieli’s music that were printed in Germany, more than in any other
country except Italy itself.5 Manuscript copies present an even more striking picture; 129 sources currently

1. Winterfeld, Johannes Gabrieli.

2. Winterfeld’s transcriptions are preserved in Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Winterfeld MS 26–28,
33, 36, 59 and 105.
3. It was only with the contributions of Francesco Caffi, and then much later René Lenaerts, that any sense emerged of the
earlier Venetian tradition to which Gabrieli was indebted. See Caffi, Storia, and Lenaerts, La chapelle.
4. Heinemann, Quantus historicus.
5. Eichhorn, Gabrieli tedesco, p. 59. For the particular case of Nuremberg, where Gabrieli’s sacred music remained popular well
into the seventeenth century, see Giselbrecht, Crossing Boundaries, p. 121.

207
 — 12 —
Giovanni Gabrieli and the New Venetian School
(Malipiero, Maderna, Nono)
Paolo Dal Molin, Michele Chiappini and Francisco Rocca

The present essay examines the reception of Giovanni Gabrieli in the writings of Gian Francesco
Malipiero, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono, together with accessible documentation regarding
their compositional, editorial, concert and recording activities. Contrary to well consolidated
opinions on the New Venetian School, the approaches of these three composers reflect neither
linear nor genealogical patterns but, on the contrary, their own personal itineraries.

Giovanni Gabrieli. Transmission and Reception of a Venetian Musical Tradition

edited by Rodolfo Baroncini, David Bryant and Luigi Collarile
Turnhout: Brepols, 2016 (Venetian Music – Studies, 1)

I wished only to show that Italy possesses older qualifications than those deriving from nineteenth-
century opera and, in this way, I hoped to enlighten younger [composers], to the advantage of
contemporary Italian music.1

T
hroughout the centuries, the idea of ‘Venetian School’ has been a source of particular inspiration
among musicians, historians and critics alike. The second half of the twentieth century was no
exception. The simplification typical of music criticism gave rise to the application of common
geographical labels to composers who often had little in common, whatever their own feelings on the matter.
Two examples from the years 1946–1950 regard the ‘Venetians’ Ettore Gracis, Almerigo Girotto, Bruno
Maderna and Gino Gorini, and the ‘Romans’ Mario Zafred, Mario Peragallo and Guido Turchi.2 At the
same time, musicians sharing the same background, development and aspirations could agree to present
themselves under the same name: a case in point is offered by the Scuola Dodecafonica Fiorentina.3
In the 1950s and ’60s, the prevailing notion of a twentieth-century Venetian School covered two distinct
and by no means complementary entities. The first linked Gian Francesco Malipiero, Bruno Maderna and

* We are grateful to the heirs of Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono, the Fondazione
Giorgio Cini and the Paul Sacher Stiftung for kind permission to reproduce or quote previously unpublished documents.
We also thank Claudia Vincis, director of the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono, for her help with research leading to this
essay. Paolo Dal Molin, Francisco Rocca and Michele Chiappini are responsible, respectively, for the introduction and
section on Luigi Nono, the section on Gian Francesco Malipiero and the section on Bruno Maderna. Abbreviations: I-Vgc
Malipiero = Archivio Gian Francesco Malipiero, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; I-Valn = Archivio Luigi Nono, Venice;
CH-Bps Maderna = Sammlung Bruno Maderna, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel.
1. I-Vgc Malipiero, letter of Gian Francesco Malipiero to Vittore Branca, 20 December 1964: ‘Io ho voluto soltanto dimostrare
che l’Italia possiede titoli più antichi di quelli derivanti dal melodramma dell’ottocento e con questo speravo d’illuminare i
giovani, a tutto vantaggio della musica italiana contemporanea’.
2. Cf., for example, Malipiero, La scuola veneziana, and Malipiero R., Zafred.
3. Cf., for example, Arrigo Benvenuti’s letter of 15 November 1954 to Carlo Prosperi, in Somigli, La Schola fiorentina,
pp. 117–118; on the origins of the Schola Fiorentina see Somigli, La Schola fiorentina, pp. 44–67.

12 — PAOLO DAL MOLIN, MICHELE CHIAPPINI AND FRANCISCO ROCCA 219