GABRIELI, ANDREA. - Musician, b. in Venice ca. 1510, d. there in 1586; not much is known about his life, which was presumably spent in the normal discharge of his duties. He was a pupil of Adrian Willaert, the distinguished Fleming who was maestro di cappella at St. Mark's; then from 1566 he was organist of the second organ of St. Mark's.
A. G., more than his master Willaert — traditionally indicated as the "founder" of the Venetian school — is the first great creator of that style which represents, with decided and clearly defined characteristics, one of the highest moments of the entire sixteenth-century polyphony. Roughly a contemporary of Palestrina, he contributed to the formation of an expression quite different, but no less intense, than that of the great Roman master. One of the most typical structural elements is to be recognized in the composition known as "for divided choirs" (cori spezzati), consisting in the alternation and reunion of two or more choirs in the unfolding of the piece; this practice, which materially would have derived its origin from the arrangement of the two choirs in the two opposite tribunes of the basilica of St. Mark's, in effect attained a genuine stylistic character, even if it is not to be understood in too rigorous a sense. In relation to this polychoral arrangement, one must emphasize the importance assumed by the natural grouping of the voices in a vertical sense, whereby the development of a harmonic sensibility determined by the succession of the voices in chords is favored. This stylistic determination stands in evident contrast with the typical writing of counterpoint developed and extended in broad melodic lines, according to the lofty models of Flemish polyphony, and it gives especially wide increase to the cohesive force of the meeting of the voices, no longer secondary but harmonically expressive. Nevertheless, in order to mark the strong and original personality of A. G., his nephew Giovanni emphasized that his music was particularly distinguished by the energy with which the force of the words and of the thought was expressed: a requirement that was taken up and variously resolved by several composers of the sixteenth century, among the first by Palestrina himself. From him A. G. differs above all in the expression of religious feeling: a stranger to the rigor of a lofty mysticism, the Venetian musician embraces a more earthly interpretation, in the sense of a broad acceptance of the stimuli offered by the human accent of the words, from which the animated and articulated unfolding of the composition seems to proceed directly. Thus one understands how the motet, broadly understood in its related forms, is preferred, for the variety of the text, to the mass, which binds the composer to a rigorous liturgical obedience; not to mention, as is natural, the forms of secular song, among which the madrigal excelled through a new impulse. Other elements gradually re-emerge to an ever greater importance: in relation to the harmonic sense of which we have spoken, the emphasis on the expressive force of the words is also due to the intervention, though not preponderant, of chromaticism and the consequent tonal alterations. In this way a so to speak descriptive character comes to prevail in the composition: and such a direction of expression fits the text into a broader aesthetic tendency of music, not to say of all sixteenth-century art. Let the citation of the Psalmi Davidici (Venice 1583) serve, for all the numerous vocal works, as representative of the genius of A. G., who with the intonations and toccatas, with the ricercars and canzonas, also left compositions of notable significance in the field of instrumental music, especially organ music.
For the bibliography v. GABRIELI, GIOVANNI.
Luigi Rongo