The national love of pomp and ceremonial display was shown in the church festivals hardly less than in the secular pageants, and all that could embellish the externals of the church solemnities was eagerly adopted. All the most distinguished members of the line of Venetian church composers were connected with the church of St. Mark as choir directors and organists, and they imparted to their compositions a breadth of tone and warmth of color fully in keeping with the historic and artistic glory of this superb temple. The founder of the sixteenth-century Venetian school was Adrian Willaert, a Netherlander, who was chapel-master at St. Mark’s from 1527 to 1563. It was he who first employed the method which became a notable feature of the music of St. Mark’s, of dividing the choir and thus obtaining novel effects of contrast and climax by means of antiphonal chorus singing. The hint was given to Willaert by the construction of the church, which contains two music galleries opposite each other, each with its organ. The freer use of dissonances, so characteristic of the adventurous spirit of the Venetian composers, first became a significant trait in the writings of Willaert.
The tendency to lay less stress upon interior intricacy and more upon harmonic strength, striking tone color, and cumulative grandeur is even more apparent in Willaert’s successors at St. Mark’s,—Cyprian de Rore, Claudio Merulo, and the two Gabrielis. Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli carried the splendid tonal art of Venice to unprecedented heights, adding a third choir to the two of Willaert, and employing alternate choir singing, combinations of parts, and massing of voices in still more ingenious profusion. Winterfeld, the chief historian of this epoch, thus describes the performance of a twelve-part psalm by G. Gabrieli: “Three choruses, one of deep voices, one of higher, and the third consisting of the four usual parts, are separated from each other. Like a tender, fervent prayer begins the song in the deeper chorus, ‘God be merciful unto us and bless us.’ Then the middle choir continues with similar expression, ‘And cause his face to shine upon us.’ The higher chorus strikes in with the words, ‘That thy way may be known upon earth.’ In full voice the strain now resounds from all three choirs, ‘Thy saving health among all nations.’ The words, ‘Thy saving health,’ are given with especial earnestness, and it is to be noticed that this utterance comes not from all the choirs together, nor from a single one entire, but from selected voices from each choir in full-toned interwoven parts. We shall not attempt to describe how energetic and fiery the song, ‘Let all the people praise thee, O God,’ pours forth from the choirs in alternation; how tastefully the master proclaims the words, ‘Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,’ through change of measure and limitation to selected voices from all the choirs; how the words, ‘And God shall bless us,’ are uttered in solemn masses of choral song. Language could give but a feeble suggestion of the magnificence of this music.”[66]