St. Mark’s Music Chapel was born at the beginning of the 14th century and very soon it becomes the centre of Venetian musical life, where style and ways of considering music suited to the magnificence of the Basilica developed.
At the second half of the 16th century a new musical thought evolved leading to a radical change that influenced the centuries that followed.
In the period when the greatest Renaissance composers actively took part in the Chapel’s life (Willaert, Merulo, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, and Monteverdi), “broken choirs“, echo sonatas – the instrumental parts with melodic lines not the same as the choral lines – were born in the Basilica, a new way of connecting music and word defines and with the aid of new instrumental techniques a new conception of the sound evolves.