Styles concertato
Stile concertato or concerting style is a term in early Baroque music that refers to either a genre or a musical style in which groups of instruments or voices share a melody, usually alternating and usually over a basso continuo. The term is derived from the Italian concertare , which means "to play together" - where "Concertato" means "in the style of a concert". In contemporary parlance, the term is almost always used as an adjective, e.g. B. "three pieces from the cycle are in concertato style".
A somewhat simplified but useful distinction between concertato and concerto can be made: the concertato style involves the contrast between opposing groups of voices and groups of instruments. The Concerto style, especially when it later developed into Concerto grosso in the Baroque period, contains the contrast between large and small groups of similar composition (later called "ripieno" and "concertino").
The style developed in Venice at the end of the 16th century mainly through the works of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, who worked in the unique acoustic space of St. Mark's Basilica. Different choirs or instrumental groups took up different positions in the basilica: Because of the sound delay from one side to the other in the large and acoustically "living" room, perfect unison was difficult, and the composers found that fantastically effective music could be composed which the choirs sing to each other in stereo, so to speak all were accompanied by an organ or other groups of instruments placed in such a way that they could hear each group equally well. The music written there was quickly performed elsewhere, and compositions in the new "concertato" style quickly became popular in Europe (first in northern Italy, then in Germany and the rest of Italy, and gradually in other parts of the continent). Another term that was sometimes used for this antiphonal use of the choirs in St. Mark was cori Spezzati. See also Venetian polychoral style and Venetian school.
In the early 17th century, almost all music with voices and basso continuo was referred to as concerto, although this use of the term differs significantly from its more modern meaning (a solo instrument or instruments accompanied by an orchestra). In the early 17th century, sacred music in concertato style often stems from the motet: the texts that would have been set for a cappella voices in gentle polyphony a hundred years earlier have now been set for voices and instruments in concertato style . These pieces, which were no longer always called motets, were given various names, including Concerto, Psalm (if it was a psalm setting), Sinfonia or Symphoniae (for example in the three books of the Symphoniae sacrae by Heinrich Schütz).
The concertato style enabled the composition of extremely dramatic music, one of the characteristic innovations of the early baroque.
Main representative
Composers of music in concertato style:
- Giovanni Croce
- Ignazio Donati
- Andrea Gabrieli
- Giovanni Gabrieli
- Alessandro Grandi
- Johann Kaspar Kerll
- Claudio Monteverdi
- Johann Pachelbel
- Michael Praetorius
- Samuel Scheidt
- Johann Hermann Schein
- Heinrich Schütz
- Lodovico Viadana
swell
- Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Age. New York, WW Norton & Co., 1947. ( ISBN 0-393-09745-5 )
- The New Harvard Music Dictionary, Ed. Don Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1986. ( ISBN 0-674-61525-5 )
- Article "concertato" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 volumes London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ( ISBN 1-56159-174-2 ).