GABRIELI, ANDREA. — Musician, born in Venice ca. 1510, died there in 1586; little information is available concerning his life, which was presumably spent in the ordinary fulfillment of his duties. He was a pupil of Adriano Willsert, the distinguished Flemish musician who was maestro di cappella at S. Marco; from 1566 onward he was organist of the second organ at S. Marco.
A. G., more than his teacher Willsert, traditionally indicated as the “founder” of the Venetian school, was the first great creator of that style which, with decisive and clearly defined characteristics, represents one of the highest moments of sixteenth-century polyphony as a whole. Roughly contemporary with Palestrina, he contributed to the formation of an expression quite different from, but no less intense than, that of the great Roman master. One of its most typical structural elements is to be recognized in the composition known as “divided choirs,” consisting in the alternation and joining together of two or more choirs in the course of the piece; this practice, which materially would have derived its origin from the arrangement of the two choirs in the two opposite galleries of the basilica of S. Marco, in fact attained a fully-fledged stylistic character, even if it should not be understood in an excessively rigid sense. In relation to this polychoral arrangement, emphasis must be placed on the importance assumed by the natural vertical grouping of the voices, whereby the development of a harmonic sensibility determined by the succession of the voices in chords was encouraged. This stylistic determination stands in evident contrast to the writing characteristic of counterpoint developed and extended in broad melodic lines, according to the elevated models of Flemish polyphony, and above all greatly increases the cohesive force of the encounter—no longer secondary, but harmonically expressive—of the voices. Nevertheless, in marking 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 thought was expressed: an aspiration accepted and variously resolved by several sixteenth-century composers,
among the first of them Palestrina himself. From whom A. G.
differs above all in the expression of religious feeling:
a stranger to the rigor of 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 it can be understood why the
motet, broadly understood in its related forms, was preferred
to the mass because of the variety of its text, which
binds the composer to a rigorous liturgical obedience; not
to mention, naturally, the forms of secular song,
among which the madrigal came to prominence through a
new impetus. Other elements gradually acquire ever greater
importance: in relation to the harmonic sense mentioned,
the prominence of the expressive force of the words is also
due to the intervention, though not predominant, of chroma-
ticism and the consequent tonal alterations. In this
way a character that might be called descriptive comes to
prevail in the composition: and this expressive tendency is
set within the text in a broader aesthetic tendency of music,
not to mention of all sixteenth-century art. Among the
numerous vocal works, let the Psalmi Davidici
(Venice 1583) stand as an example, representative of the genius of A. G.,
who, with his intonations and toccatas, his ricercari and can-
zonas, also left compositions of considerable significance in
the field of instrumental music, especially for the organ.
For the bibliography V. GABRIELE,, GIOVANNI. Luigi Rongo