Music at Rudolf II’s Court in Prague

Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-10-16

Mustering Troops and Teaching Counterpoint: The Musical Incursions of a Central European Redemption Confraternity

BRILL eBooks · 2024

• Sociology
• Aesthetics
• Art

In 1624, a print was issued in Vienna to mark the formal institution of the Communio hierarchiae plentitudinis Aetatis Jesu, a confraternity charged with consoling Christians held captive by the Ottoman Turks. Noting the Redemption confraternities connected to the Trinitarian and Mercedarian Orders, the author claimed that in every corner of Spain, ‘rivers of mercy’ flowed to comfort those in Muslim captivity, while the inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire closed their ears to the groans of Christians imprisoned by the Ottoman Turks. Having recently founded a pan-European military order in order to curb Turkish advances in the Mediterranean, the new confraternity’s principal benefactor, Michael Adolph von Althann, set about recruiting and training a musical legion. This paper traces the sonic influences and repercussions of Althann’s brotherhood, connecting his centuria musica to an ambitious 1628 anthology of stile nuovo motets, a 1629 digest of Zarlinian music theory by the Genoese Franciscan Carlo Abbate and, not least, the multitudes of musical youths educated in the Piarist schools instituted by the Madrid-born Archbishop of Olomouc, Franz Seraph of Dietrichstein. Equipped both to console and to redeem, Althann’s musical militia opened up new fronts in the battle for Central European souls.

Antonio Chemotti, The Hymnbook of Valentin Triller (Wroclaw 1555). Musical Past and Regionalism in Early Modern Silesia, Warsaw 2020

Muzyka · 2021

• Humanities
• Political Science
• Art

Book Review of: Antonio Chemotti, The Hymnbook of Valentin Triller (Wroclaw 1555). Musical Past and Regionalism in Early Modern Silesia, Warsaw 2020

Encounters with Music in Rudolf II's Prague—ERRATUM

Austrian History Yearbook · 2021-05-01

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Of Music, Morals, and Salads

Common Knowledge · 2021-05-01

Abstract This article uses music and the discourse about music to understand the practice of tolerance in Prague during the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Drawing on Las ensaladas (Prague, 1581), a collection of vernacular polyphony compiled by the Spanish composer Mateo Flecha the Younger, and Harmoniae morales (Prague, 1589–90), comprising musical settings of Latin texts by the Slovenian composer Jacobus Handl, the article argues that such music offered Prague's diverse citizens a medium for reflecting on how to live morally and peaceably. Ultimately, this article challenges the commonplace that musical harmony offered an effective model for social harmony, arguing that the practice of singing together exposed the limits of tolerance even as it illuminated how difference might be accommodated.

Encounters with Music in Rudolf II's Prague

Austrian History Yearbook · 2021 · 25 citations

• Classics
• History
• Art

Abstract This article uses three well-known members of Rudolf II's imperial court—the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the composer Philippe de Monte, and the adventurer Kryštof Harant—to delineate some ways music helped Europeans understand identity and difference in the early modern period. For Kepler, the unfamiliar intervals of a Muslim prayer he heard during the visit of an Ottoman delegation offered empirical support for his larger arguments about the harmonious properties of Christian song and its resonances in a divinely ordered universe. For Harant, listening and singing were a means of sounding out commonalities and differences with the Christians and Muslims he encountered on his travels through the Holy Land. Monte sent his music across Europe to the English recusant William Byrd, initiating a compositional exchange that imagined beleaguered Bohemian and English Catholics as Israelites in exile, yearning for Jerusalem. Collectively, these three case studies suggest that musical thinking in Rudolfine Prague did not revolve around or descend from the court or sovereign; rather, Rudolf II's most erudite subjects listened, sang, and composed to understand themselves in relation to others.

On the Trail of a Knight of Santiago: Collecting Music and Mapping Knowledge in Renaissance Europe

Music and Letters · 2020-07-23

Abstract The 2011 discovery that the substantial collection of sixteenth-century printed partbooks preserved in Madrid’s Real Conservatorio Superior de Música originally belonged to an Austrian diplomat, Wolfgang Rumpf, has opened up new perspectives on the formation of early modern music libraries. Employed by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, Rumpf was also an informant of Philip II of Spain, who rewarded him with induction into the chivalric Order of Santiago. The Order, headquartered at Uclés, received the bulk of Rumpf’s music library after his death. This article uses Rumpf’s library, and the catalogue he commissioned from the Imperial Librarian Hugo Blotius, to shed light on the music book’s place in early modern material culture, and music’s place in an expanding world of knowledge. Rumpf’s partbooks were not, in the first instance, intended for performance; they reflect instead his assiduous efforts to assemble a ‘universal library’ in which music books formed an integral part.

HEARING THE BODY OF CHRIST IN EARLY MODERN PRAGUE

Early Music History · 2019-09-11

The multi-confessional cities of early modern Central Europe resounded with sacred music. People sang to express faith, to challenge the beliefs of others, and to lay claim to shared urban spaces. This study considers how such music was heard in Prague, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, during the reign of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612). During this period, the city’s Catholics jostled for supremacy with Czech-speaking Utraquists (followers of Jan Hus), who vastly outnumbered them, and a growing population of German-speaking Lutherans. Focusing on the sonically rich Corpus Christi processions held by Prague’s Jesuits, this article examines how sounds that aggressively promoted Catholic Eucharistic doctrine were received by those who were––by chance or by design––within earshot. Viewing Catholic claims alongside non-Catholic resistance suggests that music’s power lay as much in the fact of its performance as in its deployment of specific texts and sounds.

Historical Sound Studies Seminar Syllabus

Humanities Commons CORE (Modern Language Association / Columbia University) · 2019-01-01

How does history sound? What kind of historical document is music? What does it mean to study past music as music, and what do we learn when we think of past music as sound? In this seminar, we will take up these questions together, applying them to the sounds of Europe—musical and otherwise—in the two centuries between 1550 and 1750. While music historians commonly understand this period to encompass the decline of the Renaissance and the flowering of the Baroque, we will draw on the (inter-) discipline of sound studies to understand this as an intellectual and perceptual shift: from sounding number to sounding sound. Together, we will work to develop a methodology for using music and sound to write history. If, as has recently been argued (Missfelder 2015), sound history is also the history of hearing, what is our archive? Whose ears, and whose voices, does "sound history"-as-"hearing history" help us uncover?

Editorial: New Wor(l)ds for Old Sounds

Organised Sound · 2018-07-31

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