Canzona

A French chanson with the words removed, played as sectional imitative ensemble music

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RenaissanceBaroqueTromboneCounterpoint

A canzona began as a French polyphonic chanson, moved into instrumental music in the sixteenth century, lost its words and kept its sectional imitation and dance rhythms.

Origins and era

In the 1520s Italian publishers arranged French chansons for lute and keyboard, keeping the rhythm of the model. By the middle of the century the Venetian school had expanded the manner into instrumental ensemble music for four to eight parts, and Gabrieli set groups of players against each other at San Marco to create polychoral answering. In the seventeenth century canzona sections settled into slow-fast alternation and grew directly into the Baroque sonata.

What you hear

A sectional structure, each section with its own subject and rhythmic type, sections separated by cadences. The opening often uses the long-short-short-long chanson rhythm, imitation enters densely, and phrases close on long notes. Venetian canzonas divide the parts into choirs, one answering the other, and versions for sixteen parts let blocks of sound travel through the building. Scoring is usually four to eight wind or string instruments with organ, the bass an independent line rather than accompaniment. Count the sections, then decide whether each subject is new or varied from what came before. Sections usually run a dozen bars or so and end on clear cadences, so an ensemble without words can still make the structure plain through its divisions. The last section often brings back the first subject so the piece closes on familiar material, a habit the sonata later inherited.

Key figures

Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli made the canzona a polychoral Venetian form, Massaino stretched it to sixteen parts, Merula bridged single-subject variation and dance rhythm, and Frescobaldi carried its sections onto the organ.

Lineage

It descends from the French chanson and Franco-Flemish imitative counterpoint and leads to the Baroque sonata, the fugue and Venetian double-choir writing.

Common misunderstandings

A canzona is not a song, since it borrows the rhythm and subjects of a chanson but has no words. Nor is it always cheerful, because seventeenth-century canzonas often open with a slow chromatic section.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Canzona, 用于核对从尚松到器乐的改编过程
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 1, 用于核对威尼斯分组写作的背景

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.