21 - Music and religious change

Summary

Introduction

Between the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation and the end of the Thirty Years’ War sacred music in early modern Europe underwent several waves of transformation, responding partly to the dramatic religious upheavals of the period and partly to changes in aesthetic taste and compositional technique. The most fundamental aspect of these changes – significant both to religious context and musical structure – was a new relationship of music to the word, whether scriptural or otherwise. Late medieval composers, writing music for the mass liturgy and motets for a variety of sacred functions, had focused their energies on exploiting the possibilities of intricate, and to the listener obscure, musical structures, abstract patterns of sound based on tunes whose provenance (secular or sacred) or inherent significance was of relatively little importance. Likewise, for the medieval laity the Latin words sung by church choirs had represented the sacred authority of scripture and liturgy, but their unavailability in the vernacular had hindered their capacity for inspiration and edification.

Throughout the early modern era the clear presentation and musical interpretation of words became a defining feature of church music, both Roman and Reformed. The Lutheran Reformation elevated the significance of the word in sacred music, but in fact the concern with the meaning and comprehension of words was widely shared among humanists and church leaders across the confessional divides of the early modern era. Erasmus of Rotterdam, Philip Melanchthon, and Pietro Bembo, for example, sought through the study of ancient texts the revival of some aspects of classical civilization; in music the interest in theories of rhetorical oratory (inspired by works of Quintilian and Cicero) affected entire genres, ranging from sacred music to the secular Italian madrigal and, eventually, opera.