Canzona

The canzona emerged in Italy in the later 1500s as instrumental reworkings of French chansons. Keyboard players and ensemble leaders intabulated popular chansons, abstracting their rhythmic snap—often the long–short–short pattern—into instrumental idioms. Very quickly, composers began supplying new, original subjects in the same vein, establishing the canzona as an independent instrumental form.

In Venice, the polychoral tradition and grand civic spaces encouraged antiphonal, multi-choir writing. Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli wrote influential ensemble canzonas for cornetts and sackbuts, exploiting spatial separation, echo effects, and brilliant, fanfare-like motives. These pieces typically comprise several contrasting sections, each introduced by a fresh subject treated imitatively before cadencing and moving on.

Concurrently, keyboard composers such as Claudio Merulo, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, and later Girolamo Frescobaldi cultivated the keyboard canzona. These works condensed the sectional, imitative plan into compact, fugal-like movements, sharpening contrapuntal technique and motivic economy. German organists (e.g., Scheidt, Scheidemann) adopted and adapted the genre, helping transmit its contrapuntal habits northward.

By the early 17th century, the canzona’s sectional, thematic succession evolved seamlessly into the sonata da chiesa and related instrumental sonatas. Its imitative techniques and sharply profiled subjects fed directly into Baroque fugal practice. By mid-century, the term "canzona" gradually yielded to "sonata," but its DNA lived on in the Baroque sonata, concerto, and the mature fugue.