Giovanni Gabrieli 28th May - 1st June

[doversoul1]

(Monday)
The son of a Venetian linen weaver, Giovanni Gabrieli took his surname not from his father but from his uncle, the composer Andrea Gabrieli. Donald Macleod looks at the life and music of the celebrated Venetian organist and composer, focusing today on his relationship to his illustrious namesake..

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b48rdb

[BBMmk2]

One favourite is his Sonate Pian’ e Forte. Beautiful.

[Serial_Apologist]

I like his antiphonal brass ensemble simulations of Palestrina! This strikes me as where the western orchestral tradition really started up, as opposed to the contemporaneous beginnings of opera and madrigal extensions in the direction of anthems, motets, cantatas and so on - not that I'm as knowledgeable about such early origins as I should be. Maybe this week will "learn" me summat!

[Richard Barrett]

This looks like a very good series of programmes, with some very nice performances, although the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble in the first programme will stick out like a sore thumb - "modern" brass instruments give a completely distorted view of how this music sounded.

As for Western orchestral music, one of the issues with performing these pieces is that Gabrieli didn't always give very precise instructions about instrumentation (or of distribution of parts between voices and instruments in the vocal pieces). Some realisations use cornetts and trombones almost exclusively, while others feature strings together with them, which personally I prefer; others have added recorders and other stuff too, which sounds nice but unfortunately seems to be inauthentic. I don't really get the connection with Palestrina though - Gabrieli's music is much less concerned with counterpoint and much more with the kind of timbral and harmonic effects of putting instruments in reverberant spaces.

[Serial_Apologist]

This looks like a very good series of programmes, with some very nice performances, although the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble in the first programme will stick out like a sore thumb - "modern" brass instruments give a completely distorted view of how this music sounded.

As for Western orchestral music, one of the issues with performing these pieces is that Gabrieli didn't always give very precise instructions about instrumentation (or of distribution of parts between voices and instruments in the vocal pieces). Some realisations use cornetts and trombones almost exclusively, while others feature strings together with them, which personally I prefer; others have added recorders and other stuff too, which sounds nice but unfortunately seems to be inauthentic. I don't really get the connection with Palestrina though - Gabrieli's music is much less concerned with counterpoint and much more with the kind of timbral and harmonic effects of putting instruments in reverberant spaces.

Could not one say the same about Palestrina though? - given that his music was likewise conceived with acoustic in situ alignment in mind? I've always felt there to be a very subtle shift taking place from contrapuntal to harmonic conception in the music of that period, so that the transition from the former, in which vertical simultaneities are outcomes of horizontal movement of parts, to the latter, in which that movement gets "frozen" into chords, is very hard to distinguish.

I'm only writing this because I'm equally fascinated by the ways in which the opposite process happens about 300 years later with the unravelling of harmony in Mahler and Schoenberg for example as a consequence of increasing chromatic incursion!

[BBMmk2]

That’s how I got to know Gabrieli’s music, through the PJBE’s performances. and recordings. Fond memories. I went on a course that featured them, very good it was too.

[Richard Barrett]

Could not one say the same about Palestrina though? - given that his music was likewise conceived with acoustic in situ alignment in mind? I've always felt there to be a very subtle shift taking place from contrapuntal to harmonic conception in the music of that period, so that the transition from the former, in which vertical simultaneities are outcomes of horizontal movement of parts, to the latter, in which that movement gets "frozen" into chords, is very hard to distinguish.

I'm only writing this because I'm equally fascinated by the ways in which the opposite process happens about 300 years later with the unravelling of harmony in Mahler and Schoenberg for example as a consequence of increasing chromatic incursion!

Maybe the shift has to do more with the relative proportions of homophonic and polyphonic passages in the music, not forgetting that Gabrieli also adds another idiomatically instrumental element which is the virtuoso flourishes, often in echo-like duets, which doesn't really correspond to anything in previous vocal music. But Gabrieli's music is radical in other ways too: in his specification of dynamics (Sonata pian' e forte), scoring for three equal instrumental parts plus continuo (Sonata con tre violini), structural unification through recurrence and variation of a pivotal motif (Canzon VIII and others).

[BBMmk2]

Been trying to locate a recording of the Magnificat à 20, that was played today. Can’t find it at all?

[doversoul1]

Been trying to locate a recording of the Magnificat à 20, that was played today. Can’t find it at all?

This?Not much details on this site but Hugh Keyte is mentioned.

https://www.ifagiolini.com/recordings/1612-italian-vespers/

[vinteuil]

Been trying to locate a recording of the Magnificat à 20, that was played today. Can’t find it at all?

... it's on this disc -

http://amzn.eu/4kB8Soo

.

[BBMmk2]

... it's on this disc -

http://amzn.eu/4kB8Soo

.

Ah right! Many thanks. I looked on that cd too! Gawd!

[Serial_Apologist]

Listening all this week give me a similar feeling to that which I had in the late 1970s, when serialism along with its musical enrichments started to nosedive in the historical stakes predicted by Schoenberg, leaving the likes of me wondering what on earth could be better than this? The "western pantheon" did of course come up with many wonderful subsequences; but in the 17th century it didn't yet have ideological mass cultural dumbing down to contend with since "the masses" were still largely scattered in rural communities singing and dancing around maypoles, (hmm, not sure they had maypoles in countries other than ours?).