Hawthorne Early Music editions: canzona scores
Throughout the first eighty years of music printing, publications of music for instrumental ensembles was relatively rare, around or less than 1% of all prints. This began to change in the 1580s on with the publication of the instrumental canzona.
The published instrumental canzona came out of two traditions: organists in northern Italy had used the mid 16th century French chanson as a model for abstract improvisation. The initial theme of many chansons, with a long initial note followed by short repeated notes of the same pitch, because a standard motif in many canzonas. Other features of the Chanson that were often followed in the canzona included the light, quick textures, polyphonic imitation of a simple theme in all the voice, and clearly delineated sections.
Another tradition contributing to the new instrumental repertoire was the ricercar. From around the middle of the 16th century on, there had been publications of lute, keyboard, and occasionally instrumental ensemble (published in partbooks) of pieces of a more intellectual bent, where usually a single musical idea was explored within piece, using techniques of pure counterpoint: inversion, augmentation, diminution, etc.
The first published instrumental canzona that remains extant remains extant was found in Nicola Vicentino's fifth book of madrigals in 1572. At the end of the collection was a piece labeled "canzone da sonare" ("song to play"). In the next few years, occasionally instrumental pieces could be found at the end of collections otherwise devoted to vocal compositions, such as Ingegneri's second book of madrigals a 4 voce, which contained two pieces labeled "aria di canzon francese per sonare" ("french song for playing"). In 1582, the first collection devoted to the genre was published, Florentio Maschera's Libro primo de canzoni da sonare a quattro voce, which proved to be very popular, going through multiple reprintings. Manuscript copies also exist in Torino of Maschera's pieces entabulated in German organ tablature, and in Bologna in partitura form.
Following Maschera's publication, there were a handful of similar publications in the 1580s, several more in the 1590s, and dozens in the period of 1600-1630. Typical collections often contained pieces both of the canzona/chanson tradition as well as the ricercar type of piece. Most were published in partbooks, labeled "per ogni sorte di strumenti" (for every sort of instruments), and were apparently used for both ensemble and keyboard (with keyboard players making their own intabulations in partitura, keyboard tablature, or the more familiar two-stave form). A few publications included both partitura and partbooks, and some, aimed more at keyboard players, were only in partitura (Frescobaldi preferred this form) or two-stave keyboard tabulations.
Though the genre quickly lost popularity after 1630, its name survived for abstract instrumental compositions. The canzona per sonare ("song for playing") later became the "canzona sonata" (played song) and that eventually morphed into simply "sonata" (something that is "played").
A note on terminology: Canzona simply means "song" in Italian, and is a variation of the modern standard Italian canzone. Both "canzona" and "canzone" were used interchangeably in the period, and there were many publications that used "canzone" to mean simply "song", an Italian-texted composition of lighter form than the more serious "madrigale". Other publications used "canzonetta/canzonette/" or "canzonet", the Italian apocopic form, which also became popular in English (pluralized with "canzonets"). The plural of "canzona" as well as "canzone" was usually "canzoni", with "canzone" being relatively rare, though not unheard of. "Canzona" is preferred by musicologists for discussion the instrumental genre, with "canzone" being used for lighter vocal pieces today.
Other terms occasionally used in the period included "fantasia"/"fantasie" and "capriccio"/"capricci".
"Sonare" is of course a variant of the modern standard Italian "suonare" ("to play"). "Sonata" is the feminine participle of the verb, which was to become the simple noun for the genre of instrumental composition.
The term "canzona" or "canzone" should also not be confused with the serious poetic form, with its complicated rhyme scheme, that arose in the 12th century. Madrigal books often contained multiple grouped madrigals using canzone by Petrarca and others. These were typically the most serious of poetry, and the compositions were prestige pieces by composers.
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