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The uncle of the somewhat more famous Giovanni Gabrieli, he was the first internationally renowned member of the Venetian School of composers, and was extremely influential in spreading the Venetian style in Italy as well as in Germany.
Gabrieli was a prolific and versatile composer, and wrote a large amount of music, including sacred and secular vocal music, music for mixed groups of voices and instruments, and purely instrumental music, much of it for the huge, resonant space of St. Mark's.
Once Gabrieli was working at St. Mark's, he began to turn away from the Franco-Flemish contrapuntal style which had dominated the music of the 16th century, instead exploiting the sonorous grandeur of mixed instrumental and vocal groups playing antiphonally in the great cathedral.
Gabrieli was also associated with the Confraternity of San Rocco, another Venetian church, at which some of the most renowned singers and instrumentalists in Italy performed; a vivid description of the music there survives in the travel memoirs of the English writer Thomas Coryat.
Gabrieli was ill increasingly after about 1606, at which time church authorities began to appoint deputies to take over duties he could no longer perform, and he died in 1612, of complications from a kidney stone.
Gabrieli was original not only in his use of instrumentation, but in his development of dynamic markings.
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