Transition From Renaissance To Baroque in Instrumental Music - Orchestration

Orchestration

A change between Renaissance and Baroque styles can also be discerned in the realm of orchestration, or instrumental groupings. As has been discussed above, instruments in the sixteenth century were grouped together in mixed-instrument or instrument-and-voice ensembles called consorts. With the exception of keyboards and lutes, all instruments were conceived and built this way, from rackets to recorders to sackbuts to crumhorns to viols. As the century went on, small mixed consorts of unlike instruments remained the norm.

Regardless of the type of ensemble, a heterogeneous texture prevailed in these ensembles and in the works they played; each member of the ensemble had a distinct part in the texture, which they played through from beginning to end. In the late sixteenth century, however, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli at St. Mark's cathedral in Venice began experimenting with placing diverse group of performers – instrumental and vocal – in antiphonal locations around the vast interior of the church, in what became known as cori spezzati, divided choirs.

Such music allowed for highly dramatic effects, with sudden shifts in volume, articulation, timbre and texture, for not all of the choirs were the same size, and could be made up of radically different combinations of voices and instruments. With the addition of the basso continuo in the early seventeenth century, the concertato style (stile concertato) had essentially been developed, featuring a larger overarching ensemble out of which smaller groups were selected at will to play successive musical phrases in different styles, or to perform simultaneously in different manners. Thus one phrase might be soloistic, the next set in imitative polyphony, the next homophonic, the next an instrumental tutti, and so on. Alternatively, a chorus could declaim a text homophonically while violins played in an entirely different style at the same time – in a different register, in a different location in the church, all performed over a basso continuo. The stile concertato spread throughout Europe and was particularly dominant in Italy and Germany, later forming the basis of the Baroque concerto, the concerto grosso, and the German cantata.