Music in a time of war : the efforts of Saxon Prince Johann Georg II to establish a musical ensemble, 1637-1651

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Mary E. Frandsen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Musical Life

Elector Johann Georg II of Saxony (r. 1656-1680) is primarily remembered today for his cultivation of elaborate court festivals and a lavish musical life at the Dresden court throughout his twenty-four-year reign. He played an important role in the development of sacred music in seventeenth-century Germany and privileged music in the modern Italian style. This article tells about the efforts of Saxon Prince Johann Georg II in establishing a musical ensemble between 1637 and 1651, hampered by the 30 Years‘ War (1618-1648).

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

Alessandro Grandi: A Case Study in the Choice of Texts for Motets

1988 ◽  
Vol 113 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-305
Author(s):  
Jerome Roche
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way ◽  
Musical Styles

It is perhaps still true that research into sacred types of music in early seventeenth-century Italy lags behind that into madrigal, monody and opera; it is certainly the case that the textual aspects of sacred music, themselves closely bound up with liturgical questions, have not so far received the kind of study that has been taken for granted with regard to the literary texts of opera and of secular vocal music. This is hardly to be wondered at: unlike great madrigal poetry or the work of the best librettists, sacred texts do not include much that can be valued as art in its own right. Nevertheless, if we are to understand better the context of the motet – as distinct from the musical setting of liturgical entities such as Mass, Vespers or Compline – we need a clearer view of the types of text that were set, the way in which composers exercised their choice, and the way such taste was itself changing in relation to the development of musical styles. For the motet was the one form of sacred music in which an Italian composer of the early decades of the seventeenth century could combine a certain freedom of textual choice with an adventurousness of musical idiom.

An Index of Polyphonic Chansons in English Manuscript Sources, c. 1530–1640

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Jane A. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
English Manuscript

Much has been written about the Italian madrigal and its effect upon the musical life of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. That the Italian vogue was indeed strong can be observed most dramatically in English printed and manuscript sources of the period; yet the obvious and dazzling effect this foreign idiom had upon many aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean music is balanced by the equally important and more deeply-rooted connection that England enjoyed with her nearer Continental neighbours, France and the Low Countries. The following index documents this musical connection by presenting a list of the Franco-Netherlandish chansons that appeared in English manuscript sources dating from c. 1530 to c. 1640.

Music for Martyrs

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-478
Author(s):  
Kimberly Beck Hieb
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Liturgical Practice ◽  
Papal Court

This article interrogates sacred repertoire produced in late seventeenth-century Salzburg as a reflection of a local Catholic piety that centered on sacrifice, especially the ultimate sacrifice of martyrdom. As an individual principality that was subject to both the Papal court in Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor, Salzburg provides a meaningful case study in the heterogeneous regional post-Tridentine Catholic practices that musicologists and historians alike have only begun to explore. Compositions by Andreas Hofer (1629–84) and Heinrich Biber (1644–1704) present a prime example of sacred music’s ability to manifest a region’s distinct piety. Supported by their patron Prince-Archbishop Maximilian Gandolph von Kuenburg (r. 1668–87), Hofer and Biber left behind musical evidence of this exceptional Catholicism in the feasts they elaborated with substantial concerted compositions as well as the distinct texts they set, which do not align with prescribed liturgies and likely reflect persistent local practices that resonated with the prince-archbishop’s Counter-Reformation agenda. Printed liturgical books and emblems celebrating Maximilian Gandolph further support the claim that throughout the seventeenth century liturgical practice and sacred music in Salzburg maintained a local flavor that concentrated on themes of sacrifice and martyrdom.

scholarly journals Simon Lyra and the Lutheran liturgy in the second half-century of the Reformation in Breslau

Muzyka ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Allen Scott
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
Printed Music ◽  
Congregational Participation ◽  
The Church

In 1593, Simon Lyra (1547-1601) was appointed cantor of the St. Elisabeth Church and Gymnasium in Breslau/Wrocław. In the same year, he drew up a list of prints and manuscripts that he considered appropriate for teaching and for use in Lutheran worship. In addition to this list, there are six music manuscripts dating from the 1580s and 1590s that either belonged to him or were collected under his direction. Taken together, Lyra’s repertoire list and the additional manuscripts contain well over a thousand items, including masses, motets, responsories, psalms, passions, vespers settings, and devotional songs. The music in the collections contain all of the items necessary for use in the liturgies performed in the St. Elisabeth Church and Gymnasium in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. This list provides valuable clues into the musical life of a well-established Lutheran church and school at the end of the sixteenth century. When studying collections of prints and manuscripts, I believe it is helpful to make a distinction between two types of use. Printed music represents possibilities. In other words, they are collections from which a cantor could make choices. In Lyra’s case, we can view his recommendations as general examples of what he considered liturgically and aesthetically appropriate for his time and position. On the other hand, manuscripts represent choices. The musical works in the six Bohn manuscripts associated with Lyra are the result of specific decisions to copy and place them in particular collections in a particular order. Therefore, they can provide clues as to what works were performed on which occasions. In other words, manuscripts provide a truer picture of a musical culture in a particular location. According to my analysis of Lyra’s recommendations, by the time he arrived at St. Elisabeth the liturgies, especially the mass, still followed Luther's Latin "Formula Missae" adopted in the 1520s. The music for the services consisted of Latin masses and motets by the most highly regarded, international composers of the first half of the sixteenth century. During his time as Signator and cantor, he updated the church and school choir repertory with music of his contemporaries, primarily composers from Central Europe. Three of these composers, Gregor Lange, Johann Knoefel, and Jacob Handl, may have been his friends and/or colleagues. In addition, some of the manuscripts collected under his direction provide evidence that the Breslau liturgies were beginning to change in the direction of the seventeenth-century Lutheran service in which the "Latin choir" gave way to more German-texted sacred music and greater congregational participation.

scholarly journals Recorder Use in Sacred Music during the Spanish Siglo de Oro: Archival Evidence, Historical Practices, and Applications in Performance - Audio_Files

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Miller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Siglo De Oro ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Historical Practices

This article presents findings and conclusions from a recently completed Ph.D. project which researched the use of recorders in performing sacred music in Spanish cathedrals and churches during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This study also examined interactions of the historical findings with artistic questions arising in twenty-first-century performance of sacred music repertoire. Paradoxically, while numerous sets of recorders were purchased by ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth century, most contemporary compositions did not specifically call for their use. As well, surviving sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century documentation is highly fragmentary regarding the participatory role of recorders in sacred repertoire of this period. Scholarly research and writing had not addressed this issue, and many questions persisted regarding any role of recorders in this repertoire. Sacred music of this era offers the modern musician an extensive and rich potential repertoire of supreme quality and beauty. Therefore, in seeking an historically informed basis for performance, this project asked if recorders were used in such works in Spanish ecclesiastic institutions during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and, if so, how.

MUSIC, MORALITY AND SYMPATHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH SERMON

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-35
Author(s):  
JONATHAN RHODES LEE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Religious Writing ◽  
Aesthetic Concepts ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Theory Of Moral Sentiments

ABSTRACTWhile the furrows of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious writing on music have been deeply ploughed, eighteenth-century English sermons about music have received relatively slight scholarly attention. This article demonstrates that the ideas of sympathy and sensibility characteristic of so much eighteenth-century thought are vital to understanding these sermons. There is an evolution in this literature of the notion of sympathy and its link to musical morality, a development in the attitude towards music among clergy, with this art of sympathetic vibrations receiving ever higher approbation during the century's middle decades. By the time that Adam Smith was articulating his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Handel's oratorios stood as a fixture of English musical life, religious thinkers had cast off old concerns about music's sensuality. They came to embrace a philosophy that accepted music as moral simply because it made humankind feel, and in turn accepted feeling as the root of all sociable experience. This understanding places the music sermon of the eighteenth century within the context of some of the most discussed philosophical, social, literary, musical and moral-aesthetic concepts of the time.

The Politics of Princely Entertainment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valeria De Lucca
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Cultural Shifts

The Politics of Princely Entertainment explores transformations in the politics of entertainment of the Italian aristocratic classes during the second half of the seventeenth century, a time when profound social and cultural shifts influenced the production and consumption of music. The emergence of commercial theaters in the 1630s in Venice and the great appeal that opera began to have for a large and international audience required the aristocracy to take on a new role within the complex network of agents responsible for the production not only of opera but of music in general. The increasing competition between commercial opera theaters, ruling courts, aristocratic families, and religious institutions, and the consequent professionalization of roles that previously had relied solely on patronage meant that singers, poets, and composers acquired unprecedented negotiating power. These questions are explored following the journeys and ventures of two of the most prominent patrons in seventeenth-century Italy, Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna and his wife Maria Mancini. During the thirty years under examination here, 1659–1689, the Colonna were the most influential and active agents in Roman musical life: they sponsored an unprecedented number of operas, serenatas, oratorios, public ceremonies, and carnival parades while supporting the careers of the most prominent composers, librettists, musicians, and singers of the time. Following the Prince and his wife through their travels to Venice, Spain (as Viceroys of the Kingdom of Aragon), and later Naples, this book traces the journeys not only of scores and librettos, but also of the singers, composers, and librettists whose art reached these faraway corners of Europe, serving diverse social and political purposes.

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