Canzoni per sonare

Gabrieli's canzonas grew out of the acoustics of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, where separate choirs of musicians were placed in different galleries and answered one another across the space. Listen for that call and response: a bright phrase played by one group of brass or winds, tossed across to another, then combined as the groups join for a fuller, ringing close. Each canzona is built from short, contrasting sections rather than one continuous melody, so the music moves in bursts, a quick fanfare-like idea, a slower more sustained passage, then a livelier dance-like close, all stitched together without pause. There is no soloist to follow; instead, the pleasure is in the interplay of blocks of sound, near versus far, loud versus soft, echoing the way Gabrieli would have spread his players around the church's balconies. Modern performances, given in a concert hall rather than a cathedral, often place brass choirs on opposite sides of the stage or hall to recreate that spatial effect. Because these are relatively short, self-contained pieces, a program will often perform two or more together, so listen for how each one has its own character even while sharing the same bright, ceremonial sound world of trumpets, trombones, and cornetts.

Giovanni Gabrieli spent most of his career as organist at St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, where the building's multiple choir lofts encouraged composers to write for groups of musicians placed apart from one another. His canzonas, published in collections during his lifetime and after his death in 1612, were part of this Venetian tradition of "polychoral" music, originally conceived for the ceremonial and festive occasions of the basilica. Written for combinations of brass and wind instruments rather than voices, they helped establish instrumental ensemble writing as its own art form, independent of vocal music. After Gabrieli's death the pieces fell out of common use for centuries, but 20th-century brass ensembles rediscovered them, and they are now a staple of the brass and wind repertoire, often performed in editions that group two or more canzonas together for a single concert.