The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

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.

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOÃO PEDRO D'ALVARENGA

ABSTRACTThe elevation of the Portuguese Royal Chapel to the rank of Patriarchal Church in 1716 was part of a larger process of ‘Romanization’ – that is, of assimilation and adaptation of Roman models within Portuguese music and culture. This involved the training of numerous chaplain-singers and young Portuguese composers in Rome, as well as the importation of chant books, ministers, singers and even the maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia, Domenico Scarlatti. According to the anonymous ‘Breve rezume de tudo o que se canta en cantochaõ, e canto de orgaõ pellos cantores na santa igreja patriarchal’ (Brief summary of all that is sung in plainchant and polyphony by the singers at the holy Patriarchal Church) – a document written at some point between 1722 and 1724 – the repertory of the Patriarchal Church was a varied mixture of works by thirty-two identified composers, mostly Italian and Portuguese, from a period ranging from the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Some of the repertory for Holy Week is also extant in three large choirbooks prepared by a copyist from the Patriarchal Church in 1735 and 1736 for use in the Ducal Chapel in Vila Viçosa. These include ‘modern’ additions to late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century pieces and also some curious reworkings, made with the purpose of adjusting older works to newly ‘Romanized’ performance conditions and aesthetic ideals. The sources examined in this article thus show that Portuguese ‘Romanization’, far from being a simple transplantation of ideas and practices from the centre to the periphery, was a dynamic process of acculturation and adaptation rooted in emerging forms of historical consciousness.


Author(s):  
Joshua M. White

This chapter turns to the Ottoman victims of Catholic corsairs and pirates who were carried off to Malta and Livorno to be sold as slaves and/or held for ransom. It focuses on the Ottoman magistrates (kadis) who, as judge-notaries, as captives, and as official mouthpieces of the Ottoman state, were involved in every stage of the ransom slavery industry in the eastern Mediterranean. From the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, a number of Ottoman judges could always be found imprisoned in Maltese dungeons, where their legal expertise proved critical for preparing surety agreements and ransom contracts acceptable in courts throughout the Ottoman Mediterranean. The phenomenon of the kadis of Malta reflects the essential paradox of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mediterranean: the inverse relationship between Ottoman maritime security and the importance of Ottoman law as an almost universally acceptable legal lingua franca from Istanbul to Malta.


1968 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. S. Garlake

Since the start of archaeological investigation in Rhodesia, isolated sherds of imported Chinese ceramics have been found in the important Iron Age ruins of Zimbabwe, Khami and Dhlo Dhlo. More recently, abundant finds of both Chinese and European glazed wares have occurred in excavations of early Portuguese trading stations within Rhodesia. All such imports are here redescribed from an examination of the finds and from a detailed study of the early excavator's reports. As a result, some important early misdescriptions and misunderstandings become apparent. The dating evidence provided by the imports is therefore also re-examined.Very rare sherds of Chinese celadons are virtually the only imported ceramics found in the later deposits at Zimbabwe, and at five other sites. These may be correlated with finds from J. S. Kirkman's excavations in trading settlements of the East African coast, and are dated certainly earlier than the sixteenth century. The finds from four other sites, the most important being the Khami and Dhlo Dhlo ruins, consist mainly of Chinese blue-and-white porcelains and their European imitations. They correlate well with finds not only from the seventeenth and early eighteenth century Portuguese trading stations in Rhodesia, but also with finds from contemporary deposits at Fort Jesus, Mombasa. The precise dating of the Khami and Dhlo Dhlo ruins within this period, as suggested by the imports, shows Khami to belong to the early seventeenth century with Dhlo Dhlo a century later. The divergence between the Khami, Dhlo Dhlo and Portuguese imported ceramics and those of Zimbabwe is sufficiently striking to suggest strongly that Zimbabwe was of negligible trading power by the time the Portuguese penetrated the interior in the sixteenth century. Evidence bearing on this, particularly from the 1958 Zimbabwe excavations, is discussed in detail.Glass beads and glass are the only other imports to survive in Central African archaeological contexts and are of considerably less chronological value than the ceramics. They are, however, also considered, as are the pattern and extent of the trade with the interior evidenced by these imports.


1992 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-122
Author(s):  
Eva Linfield

Our understanding of the long-term tonal relationships that grow out of seventeenth-century harmonic language is at an elementary stage. An enormous gap seems to exist between our ability to deal with, on the one hand, a sixteenth-century compositional language that basically adheres to a contrapuntal technique and tonally abides by the rules of modality and, on the other, an eighteenth-century tonal language for which we quietly assume harmonic functionality. That scholars have largely avoided an investigation of harmonic language in the seventeenth century is perhaps surprising. Problematic and somewhat enigmatic features of seventeenth-century music are, in some cases, not very different from the characteristics Harold S. Powers attributed to late sixteenth-century modal music: ‘sometimes faintly exotic, often charmingly vague and undirected to our ears, but hardly alien’. Benito V. Rivera appeared to corroborate Powers's perception when he characterized some of the idiosyncrasies of seventeenth-century harmonic practice as ‘isolated harmonic quirkiness’.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-206
Author(s):  
Sushil Chaudhry

Commercial relations between India and Iran have existed since antiquity, but they particularly flourished from the latter part of the sixteenth century to the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Partly, this could be due to greater degree of security on the land routes established under the two contiguous empires, the Mughal and the Safavid. Partly also, it owed much to the changing pattern of Eurasian commerce: Iran obtained increasing amount of silver from Europe in return for its silk, and with this augmented supply of silver, Iran could buy more Indian goods, especially textiles. Much too was owed to the enterprise of merchants, the Armenians of New Julfa and the large members of Indian merchants (Multanis and Gujaratis) who, practically settled in Iran, engaged in both commerce and usury.1


Zograf ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Dragan Vojvodic

In the katholikon of the monastery of Praskvica there are remains of two layers of post-Byzantine wall-painting: the earlier, from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and later, from the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the conclusion based on stylistic analysis and technical features. The portions of frescoes belonging to one or the other layer can be clearly distinguished from one another and the content of the surviving representations read more thoroughly than before. It seems that the remains of wall-painting on what originally was the west facade of the church also belong to the earlier layer. It is possible that the church was not frescoed in the lifetime of its ktetor, Balsa III Balsic.


1942 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
James G. Mann

The two gauntlets which were exhibited to the Society by kind permission of the Archdeacon of Richmond, on 26th November 1941, form part of the funeral achievement of Sir Edward Blackett (died 1718), hanging above his monument in the north transept of Ripon Cathedral. The achievement consists of a close-helmet of the sixteenth century with a wooden funeral crest of a falcon (for Blackett); a tabard; a cruciform sword in its scabbard, of the heraldic pattern of the early eighteenth century; and two iron gauntlets. The wooden escutcheon and pair of spurs which must once have completed the group are now missing.


2020 ◽  
pp. 77-105
Author(s):  
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

This chapter explores the writings of four philosophers who were either directly or implicitly responding to the philosophers of the seventeenth century discussed in the previous chapter. The chapter looks at two philosophers who seem to adopt parts of the Hobbesian worldview—Pufendorf and Mandeville—and two who explicitly contest it: Shaftesbury and Butler. The primary questions they ask involve human motivations—whether they can be altruistic or must be acts of self-interest or self-love.


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