Context and Meaning in 17th-Century Sacred Music

Jagiellonian University - Institute of Musicology | www.muzykologia.uj.edu.pl
Round Table 3
chairpersons: Robert Kendrick (Chicago) and Jeffrey Kurtzman (St. Louis)
R. L. Kendrick
‘Context and Meaning in 17th-Century Sacred Music’
Over the past twenty years, musical scholarship on the ‘long’ seventeenth century (ca. 1580-1714) has begun to discover the repertorial extent, liturgical use, and some of the aesthetics of sacred music across the Christian religious
confessions. (After the pioneer work of Adler [1966] and Harran [1999], such studies are conceivable for Jewish practice in this period, as well, but will probably require close work on archival and other non-musical sources). The work
of this session’s other co-chair, for instance (Kurtzman 1972 and 2001, along with many other essays too numerous to
cite here), has gone a long way in explaining the extent and practice of one centrally musical Hour in Italian Catholicism. More recent efforts in this line of work has also had to overcome the view of the supposedly blanket and
universalizing effect of the Council of Trent on music and liturgical practice, and to include the variable, local, and
often political nature of Catholic ritual itself in early modern Europe (Monson 2002; Ditchfield 1998).
The idea that the sacrality, alterity, and ritual nature of Protestant liturgy might actually parallel such features in
Catholicism has taken rather longer to establish itself, to overcome traditionalis ‘totalist’ historiography of the reformers’ relation to Catholic practice, and to raise implications for the study of Protestant sacred music (Herl 2004).
Only recently have studies of the liturgical practice and cultural politics of such a central court as that of Dresden, the
site of much of Schütz’s work, begun to highlight the changes in musical politics, trends towards Italianization, and
confessional limitations to change at the Saxon court (Frandsen 2006)
To some degree, the placement of liturgical music in quite specific cultural (hagiographic, political, ecclesiastical) context in this time period has followed what has been standard practice in the last decades of medieval music
historiography (Bloxam 1987; Robertson 2002). Yet the early modern period presents its own problems. Despite some stellar recent work in outlining liturgical music practice at the model court of the early modern absolutist state
(Dompnier 2002, and especially Maral 2002), the study of French religious music has largely not absorbed the kinds of
nuanced differentiation and anthropological meaning achieved in some recent work on French tragèdie lyrique (Burgess
1998). Even more unknown, despite valiant efforts by scholars (Carreras and García García 2005; Rodriguez forthcoming), is the deep symbolic connection among music, liturgy, and court ritual in Spain, a nexus that has been
more fully treated by art historians (Orso 1986), while the complex colonial situation of sacred music in the Americas
has long been dominated by indigenous-centered views.
Furthermore, even at the relatively well-known dynastic centers, simply outlining liturgy and music does not
explain the entire state of sacred music. As has been brilliantly shown (Saunders 1995), much of the sacred music at
the Austrian Habsburg court under Ferdinand II seems to have been generated by the personal and private devotion
of the monarch and his family traditions. Analogous points could be made for the Stuart court at about the same time
(Pinto 1998). On a lower social level, the individual- and institution-specific meanings of the music of the famed musical nuns of Seicento Italy become evident under close social readings of their situation (Monson 1995). The special
status of these women as brides of Christ also meant that their musical use of the century’s favorite prooftext, the
Song of Songs, carried a personalized meaning beyond and above the Marian and Christological allegory of the book
evident in the many other musical settings in the seventeenth century (Kendrick 1994).
Indeed, the entire issue of seventeenth-century devotion raises the problem of what liturgy meant to individuals, and what kind of sacrality is to be found in the large amount of music produced or used outside the formalized
liturgical context. In this sense, too, work on early modern Europe echoes that on late medieval traditions, but the real
content of the century’s devotion, in both Protestant and Catholic worlds, remains to be studied, not to mention the
real crossover between the confessions’ devotional thought throughout the century (the typical musical example being
that of Schütz’ Cantiones sacrae of 1625, discussed in Volckmar-Waschk 2001). The relationship between music and
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major shifts in devotional politics (the condemnation of Catholic Quietism, or the defeat of Dutch Remonstrantism)
has also largely gone unstudied. For instance, to what degree might the Roman oratorios around Christina of Sweden
have reflected her own Quietist leanings and highly heterodox philsophy (Åkeman 1991; a provisional negative answer is provided by Morelli 1998)? A first step in this regard is to take the non-liturgical texts of sacred music seriously,
and not simply as ‘barocke Allegorienschwulst’, in relation to the devotional currents around them. A second step
might also include the musical rearrangements of liturgical texts as keys to personal and social meaning in these settings.
Just as an approach based on devotional context might transcend the hoary old liturgical/paraliturgical taxonomy of sacred music, so too some of the most interesting musical forms of the century—villancicos, cantiones natalitiae, oratorios, ‘modern’ settings of psalms, litanies—found a place in both social ritual and personal devotion. As
recent work has shown (Blazey 1991, Riepe 1998), litanies, for instance, were used in Catholic cities to demarcate
confessional space (Fisher 2004), to further civic unity around urban patron saints, to ward off physical (and spiritual)
ill (in exorcisms), and to assure a safe passage to heavenly repose to individuals on the point of death. Although
better-known in Catholic use, litanies were also composed and used by Lutherans. The dialectic between social and
individual meaning for this music is only beginning to be understood (Kendrick 2005).
In that sense, ‘context’ and ‘meaning’ for early modern sacred music are mutually interdependent, and changes
in context could mean changes in meaning. This is quite literally true in the Protestant retextings of avant-garde Italian
motets (e.g. Mathias Weckmann’s copies of such pieces in Lüneburg, Ratsbücherei, K.N. 206), but even an unchanged
Italian piece, originally written for a confraternity, a specific church, or a patron in a Catholic context, might have lost
social—and gained individual (or at least a different kind of social)—meaning when bought, copied, or performed by
a Lutheran cantor. This panel welcomes contributions that serve to address these questions, raise new ones, or problematize the still too prevalent verities on sacred music in this unstable—and deeply fruitful—moment of European
history.
References
Adler, Israel, La pratique musicale savante dans quelques communautes juives en Europe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1966)
Åkeman, Susanne, Queen Christina of Sweden and her circle : the transformation of a seventeenth-century libertine (Leiden, 1991)
Blazey, David A., “The Litany in Seventeenth-Century Italy”, Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Durham, 1990.
Bloxam, M. Jennifer, “A Survey of Late Medieval Service Books for the Low Countries: Implications for Sacred Polyphony, 1460-1520”, Ph. D. dissertation, Yale University
Burgess, Geoffrey V., “Ritual in the tragédie en musique : from Lully's Cadmus et Hermione (1673) to Rameau's Zoroastre
(1749)”, Ph. D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1998
Carreras, Juan José and B. García García (eds.), The Royal Chapel in the Time of the Habsburgs (Woodbridge, 2005)
Ditchfield, Simon, 'In search of local knowledge: rewriting early modern Italian religious history', Cristianesimo nella
storia, 19 (1998), 255-296
Dompnier, Bernard (ed.) Maîtrises et chapelles aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: des institutions musicales au service de Dieu (Clermont-Ferrand, 2002)
Fisher, Alexander J., Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580-1630 (Aldershot, 2004)
Frandsen, Mary, Crossing Confessional Boundaries: The Patronage of Italian Sacred Music in Seventeenth-Century Dresden (New York and Oxford, 2006)
Harran, Don, Salomone Rossi: Jewish Musician in Late Renaissance Mantua (Oxford and New York, 1999)
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Herl, Joseph Worship Wars in Early Lutheranism: Choir, Congregation, and Three Centuries of Conflict (New York,
2004)
Kendrick, Robert L., “Sonet vox tua in auribus meis: Song of Songs Exegesis and the Seventeenth-Century Motet”, Schütz-Jahrbuch 16 (1994): 99-118
--“Devotion, Piety, and Commemoration: Sacred Songs and Oratorios”, in J. Butt and T. Carter (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Seventeenth-Century Music (Cambridge, 2005), 324-77
Kurtzman, Jeffrey G., “The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 and their Relationship with Italian Sacred Music of the Early
Seventeenth Century”, Ph. D. dissertation, Univ. of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), 1972
-- The Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: Music, Context, Performance (Oxford and New York, 1999)
Maral, Alexandre, La chapelle royale de Versailles sous Louis XIV: cérémonial, liturgie et musique (Sprimont, 2002)
Monson, Craig, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley, 1995)
--“The Council of Trent Revisited”, Journal of the American Musicological Society 55(1) 2002: 1-38
Morelli, Arnaldo, “Il mecenatismo musicale di Cristina di Svezia. Una riconsiderazione”, in Convegno Internazionale:
Cristina di Svezia e la Musica (Rome, 1998), 321-46
Orso, Steven N., Art and Death at the Spanish Habsburg Court: The Royal Exequies for Philip IV (Columbia, MO, 1989)
Pinto, David, “The True Christmas: Carols at the Court of Charles I”, in A. Ashbee (ed.), William Lawes (1602-1645):
Essays on his Life, Times and Work (Aldershot, 1998), 97-120
Riepe, Juliane, Die Arciconfraternita di S. Maria della Morte in Bologna: Beiträge zur Geschichte des italienischen Oratoriums im 17.
und 18. Jahrhundert (Paderborn, 1998)
Robertson, Anne W., Guillaume de Machaut and Reims: Context and Meaning in his Musical Works (Cambridge, 2002)
Rodriguez, Pablo L. “La musica delle Quaranta ore nella Cappella Reale spagnola nel XVII secolo”, forthcoming in
the proceedings of the A.M.I.S./ Università Cattolica conference on “La Musica e il Sacro”, Brescia 2005
Saunders, Steven, Cross Sword and Lyre: Sacred Music at the Imperial Court of Ferdinand II of Habsburg (1619-1637) (Oxford,
1995)
Volckmar-Waschk, Heide, Die “Cantiones sacrae” von Heinrich Schutz: Entstehung, Texte, Analysen (Kassel, etc. 2001)
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Jagiellonian University - Institute of Musicology | www.muzykologia.uj.edu.pl
Jeffrey Kurtzman
“Context and Meaning in 17th-Century Sacred Music”
Polyphonic music for Vespers services in the 16th and 17th centuries, whether in monastic institutions, confraterntities,
court chapels, or in collegiate, parish, or cathedral churches, presented primarily fixed, formalized texts that were not
subject to the influences of styles of spirituality, devotion, or prayer that so affected the changing selection and character of motet texts in this period. However, the character and style of musical expression does change, largely because of the increasing significance of the Vespers service as a vehicle for polyphony and modern musical styles of
both composition and performance. Vespers polyphony ranged from falsobordone to eight-voice choirs, from modest
polyphonic settings for four or five unaccompanied voices to large arrays of multiple choirs of voices, organs, and
other instruments, from virtuoso solo settings to complex concertato structures.
The variety of settings reflects both the immediate context of individual Vespers services—whether for a service of no special importance in a monastery or the feast day of the patron saint of a major church—and the gradual
changes in musical stylistic characteristics and preferences from the beginning of the 16th to the end of the 17th centuries. Contexts are not especially difficult to define, since they depend on liturgical functions, specific locations, and
financial and musical resources, but meaning is more elusive. Indeed, what is the meaning of “meaning?” In some
cases meaning centers on elaborate displays of civic piety and even competitiveness among institutions in the degree
of splendor and spectacle they could mount. Meaning of a different kind can also be found in the typical approaches
to setting certain graphic or emotionally charged words or concepts in a text, or the general character of a text, such
as the psalm De profundis. Meaning can also be conventional, as in the traditional use of coro spezzato psalms at St.
Mark’s in Venice for a long list of major feasts. Meaning may also accrue to position in the liturgy, reflected in settings
of the first psalm of every Vespers, Dixit Dominus, and the Magnificat, the closing canticle of all Vespers services. On
a more personal level, every worshipper may find a different meaning in the text and music heard. There is no end to
the kinds of meaning we may find in individual compositions, or the role they play in a specific service or for a particular individual. Nevertheless, meaning is the primary reason we as human beings and scholars are interested in this
music, requiring us to explore and seek to understand it in whatever ways and in as many dimensions we can.
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