Giovanni Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.
Andrea Gabrieli was an Italian composer and organist of the late Renaissance. The uncle of the somewhat more famous Giovanni Gabrieli, he was the first internationally renowned member of the Venetian School of composers, and was extremely influential in spreading the Venetian style in Italy as well as in Germany.
Adrian Willaert was a Flemish composer of High Renaissance music. Mainly active in Italy, he was the founder of the Venetian School. He was one of the most representative members of the generation of northern composers who moved to Italy and transplanted the polyphonic Franco-Flemish style there.
A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance and early Baroque (1600–1750) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number of voices varies from two to eight, but usually features three to six voices, whilst the metre of the madrigal varies between two or three tercets, followed by one or two couplets. Unlike the verse-repeating strophic forms sung to the same music, most madrigals are through-composed, featuring different music for each stanza of lyrics, whereby the composer expresses the emotions contained in each line and in single words of the poem being sung.
Gioseffo Zarlino was an Italian music theorist and composer of the Renaissance. He made a large contribution to the theory of counterpoint as well as to musical tuning.
A ritornello is a recurring passage in Renaissance music and Baroque music for orchestra or chorus.
Concertato is a term in early Baroque music referring to either a genre or a style of music in which groups of instruments or voices share a melody, usually in alternation, and almost always over a basso continuo. The term derives from Italian concerto which means "playing together"—hence concertato means "in the style of a concerto." In contemporary usage, the term is almost always used as an adjective, for example "three pieces from the set are in concertato style."
In music history, the Venetian School was the body and work of composers working in Venice from about 1550 to around 1610, many working in the Venetian polychoral style. The Venetian polychoral compositions of the late sixteenth century were among the most famous musical works in Europe, and their influence on musical practice in other countries was enormous. The innovations introduced by the Venetian school, along with the contemporary development of monody and opera in Florence, together define the end of the musical Renaissance and the beginning of the musical Baroque.
Hans Leo Hassler was a German composer and organist of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras, elder brother of lesser known composer Jakob Hassler. He was born in Nürnberg and died in Frankfurt.
In music, a chorale concerto is a short sacred composition for one or more voices and instruments, principally from the very early German Baroque era. Most examples of the genre were composed between 1600 and 1650.
Baldassare Donato was an Italian composer and singer of the Venetian school of the late Renaissance. He was maestro di cappella of the prestigious St. Mark's Basilica at the end of the 16th century, and was an important figure in the development of Italian light secular music, especially the villanella.
Giovanni Croce was an Italian composer of the late Renaissance, of the Venetian School. He was particularly prominent as a madrigalist, one of the few among the Venetians other than Monteverdi and Andrea Gabrieli.
Gioseffo Guami was an Italian composer, organist, violinist and singer of the late Renaissance Venetian School. He was a prolific composer of madrigals and instrumental music, and was renowned as one of the finest organists in Italy in the late 16th century; he was also the principal teacher of Adriano Banchieri.
Giulio Cesare Martinengo was an Italian composer and teacher of the late Renaissance and early Baroque Venetian School. He was the predecessor to Claudio Monteverdi at San Marco.
The Colossal Baroque style is a name which has been coined to describe a number of musical compositions from the 17th and 18th centuries composed in an opulent, magnificent and large-scaled style. Such works frequently make use of polychoral techniques and often feature instrumental forces considerably larger than the norm for the Baroque period. The Colossal Baroque had its roots in Italy, in the resplendent multiple polychoral music of the Venetian School, in the sumptuous, extravagant productions of the Medici court, for example the 40- and 60-voice Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno by Alessandro Striggio, and in the large polychoral works of the Roman School, many of which were written long after the Venetian School had vanished. An impetus for this music was the Council of Trent, which marked the beginning of the Counter-Reformation. Some attendees of the Council held the unofficial point of view that music should be subservient to text, as idealized and exemplified in the choral music of Palestrina. Some critics held that this was not as achievable in larger choral textures.
In the years centering on 1600 in Europe, several distinct shifts emerged in ways of thinking about the purposes, writing and performance of music. Partly these changes were revolutionary, deliberately instigated by a group of intellectuals in Florence known as the Florentine Camerata, and partly they were evolutionary, in that precursors of the new Baroque style can be found far back in the Renaissance, and the changes merely built on extant forms and practices. The transitions emanated from the cultural centers of Northern Italy, then spread to Rome, France, Germany, and Spain, and lastly reached England . In terms of instrumental music, shifts in four discrete areas can be observed: idiomatic writing, texture, instrument use, and orchestration.
Sonata pian' e forte was composed by Italian composer and organist Giovanni Gabrieli and published in 1597. This is one of the earliest known pieces of music to specify loud and quiet passages in print..
Giovanni Priuli was a Venetian composer and organist of the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. A late member of the Venetian School, and a contemporary of Claudio Monteverdi, he was a prominent musician in Venice in the first decade of the 17th century, departing after the death of his associate Giovanni Gabrieli and ending his career at the Habsburg court in Austria. His music straddled the dividing-line between Renaissance and Baroque idioms.
The Cappella Marciana is the modern name for the choir and instrumentalists of St Mark's Basilica, Venice, Italy.
The Venetian Renaissance had a distinct character compared to the general Italian Renaissance elsewhere. The Republic of Venice was topographically distinct from the rest of the city-states of Renaissance Italy as a result of their geographic location, which isolated the city politically, economically and culturally, allowing the city the leisure to pursue the pleasures of art. The influence of Venetian art did not cease at the end of the Renaissance period. Its practices persisted through the works of art critics and artists proliferating its prominence around Europe to the 19th century.
