Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscape of Counter-Reformation Bavaria

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations for Source Locations
I. Sound, Space, and Confession in Counter-Reformation Bavaria
Historical soundscapes
Sound, space, and place
Identity, discipline, and confessionalization
The soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria
The structure and scope of the book
II. Sound and the Spaces of Worship
Public churches and the experience of liturgical space
Congregational song
St. Michael in Munich, the Jesuits, and Counter-Reformation worship
Cathedral, Collegiate, and Parish churches in the age of Tridentine reform
The cathedral of Freising
Unsere Liebe Frau in Munich
St. Peter in Munich
Liturgy in the religious orders
Courtly spaces for liturgy: the Bavarian court chapel
The court chapel of St. George and liturgical music in the sixteenth
century
The new court chapel of Mary of the Immaculate Conception and
liturgical music under Maximilian I
III. Sound and Spaces of Devotion
Devotional polyphony for cultivated spaces
Monastic devotion
Confraternities and congregations
The Marian Congregations
Marian, Eucharistic, and other confraternities
Corporate devotional services and gatherings
Funerals and burials
Salve services
Seasonal devotions for Christmas and Lent
Supplications and Celebrations
Song and the soundscape
IV. Sound and Confession in the Civic Sphere
Bells and the urban soundscape
Regulating the sounds of profane life
Song in the public sphere
Sound in public religious spectacles
V. Music, Sound, and Processional Culture
Corpus Christi processions
The Corpus Christi procession in Munich
Good Friday processions
Processions of supplication and triumph
VI. Sound, Pilgrimage, and the Spiritual Geography of Counter-Reformation Bavaria
Pilgrimage in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation
The music of pilgrimage: songs and litanies
Bavarian pilgrimage songs
The litany in Bavarian pilgrimage
Sound in the practice of pilgrimage
Departure
En route and upon arrival
A pilgrimage to St. Benno in Munich
Bibliography
Index

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Music, Piety, and Propaganda: The Soundscapes of Counter-Reformation Bavaria explores the nature of sound as a powerful yet ambivalent force in the religious struggles that permeated Germany during the Counter-Reformation. Author Alexander J. Fisher goes beyond a musicological treatment of composers, styles, and genres to examine how music, and more broadly sound itself, shaped the aural landscape of Bavaria as the duchy emerged as a militant Catholic bulwark. Fisher focuses particularly on the ways in which sound--including bell-ringing, gunfire, and popular song, as well as cultivated polyphony--not only was deployed by Catholic secular and clerical elites to shape the religious identities of Bavarian subjects, but also carried the potential to challenge and undermine confessional boundaries. Surviving literature, archival documents, and music illustrate the ways in which Bavarian authorities and their allies in the Catholic clergy and orders deployed sound to underline crucial theological differences with their Protestant antagonists, notably the cults of the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the saints. Official and popular rituals like divine worship, processions, and pilgrimages all featured distinctive sounds and music that shaped and reflected an emerging Catholic identity. Although officials imposed a severe regime of religious surveillance, the Catholic state's dominance of the soundscape was hardly assured. Fisher traces archival sources that show the resilience of Protestant vernacular song in Bavaria, the dissemination and performance of forbidden, anti-Catholic songs, the presence of Lutheran chorales in nominally Catholic church services into the late 16th century, and the persistence of popular "noise" more generally. Music, Piety, and Propaganda thus reveals historical, theological, and cultural issues of the period through the piercing dimension of its sounds, bringing into focus the import of sound as a strategic cultural tool with significant impact on the flow of history.

Reviews

Music and Letters

Alexander Fisher skilfully recreates the diverse and colourful sound-world in a monograph that, thanks to the combination of insight and overview, will be greatly valued by specialists in this area and by those new to the material

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