The representative form of early baroque instrumental ensemble music was the canzon da sonar, or “play chanson,” which was the instrumental variety of the secular part songs of the High Renaissance. The modest beginnings of these instrumental chansons soon absorbed the effects of the polychoral concerted style of the Venetians. Originally written for four or five parts, these compositions now display eight, ten, twelve, and even sixteen parts, requiring the combination of a small orchestra. By 1600 the canzone was so firmly established in both keyboard and ensemble music as a form of instrumental music that the epithet da sonar, “to be played,” was omitted. Together with the ricercar, which had already asserted its independence, the canzone developed such varieties and cross-species as the fantasia and capriccio, the latter two in their turn evolving a mixed form called “sonata.” The seventeenth-century sonata has nothing in common with the species as we know it since Beethovenian times; the term signified merely the purely instrumental nature of such compositions and no specific formal structure was attached to it. Recalling the remarkably neat form of the French chanson—which we must constantly remember—it is not surprising to find that it was the canzone which first showed a regular periodic formal structure, and it was not long before the first signs of symphonic principles in the modern sense of the word, thematic development as established by Frescobaldi in keyboard music, appeared. Indeed, we are dealing in the canzone with one of the far ancestors of the classical symphony.
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