Creativity in Seventeenth-Century Music

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Herissone
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Authority Figures ◽  
Constant State ◽  
Inner Parts

The early modern period witnessed important societal shifts that eventually affected both the employment status of professional musicians and their creative approaches. Throughout the seventeenth century, however, most composition continued to be carried out by musicians employed within the traditional patronage system according to long-established creative principles often unfamiliar to us today. Apprentice composers learned by modeling new pieces on preexisting works by esteemed authority figures and through improvisation techniques, using standard formulae as building blocks. Both this improvisatory foundation and the simple melody-plus-bass style of many genres meant that notation was frequently unnecessary in the initial creative stages—although erasable materials were sometimes used by inexperienced composers and for complex, erudite music—and there was no direct relationship between the creation of a notated source and stages in the compositional process. Creativity was also frequently a collaborative endeavor, involving numerous contributors: the named composer might compose only the core melody and bass, with inner parts either provided by musicians employed to “set” the composition for the required ensemble or filled in by a continuo player. It was also a graduated process, with works often being subjected to successive bouts of reworking by multiple musicians, not only revising and adapting the music to suit new performing contexts but also making changes as a matter of course, in a process of “serial recomposition.” The result was a creative culture in which works were in a constant state of flux, as they were perpetually renewed and reinvigorated by a multilayered creative community.

scholarly journals Violence as Identity: Christians and Muslims in Hungary in the Medieval and Early Modern Period

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Nora Berend
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period

Wrote Miklós Zrínyi (Nikola Zrinski) in the mid seventeenth century about those who died fighting against the Ottomans. The poet, who himself was engaged in both politics and war, defined Hungarian identity as Christian and premised on warfare unto death against Muslims.

CIRCULATING MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY: MUSICA POETICA TREATISES OF JOHANN HERMANN SCHEIN AND MICHAEL ALTENBURG IN THE LIBRARY OF JOHANN CASPAR TROST

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 131-201
Author(s):  
Inga Mai Groote ◽  
Dietrich Hakelberg
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Book History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Musica Poetica

Recent research on the library of Johann Caspar Trost the Elder, organist in Halberstadt, has led to the identification of a manuscript with two unknown treatises on musica poetica, one a lost treatise by Johann Hermann Schein and the other an unknown treatise by Michael Altenburg. Together they offer fresh insights into the learning and teaching of music in the early modern period. The books once owned by Trost also have close connections to his personal and professional life. This article situates the newly discovered manuscript in the framework of book history and Trost’s biography, and discusses the two treatises against the background of contemporary books of musical instruction (Calvisius, Lippius, or Finolt). The historical context of the manuscript, its theoretical sources and its origins all serve to contribute to and further the current understanding of musical education in early modern central Germany. An edition of the treatises is provided.

scholarly journals “Turkish” Textiles in South-Eastern and East-Central Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Evidence of Transylvanian Customs Accounts

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Serial Data

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.

Looking for Regional Words in Late Seventeenth-Century England: Bishop White Kennett and his Glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695)

Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Javier Ruano García
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Morphological Traits ◽  
Additional Data ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Lexical Diversity ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Descriptive Account ◽  
History Of

The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent scarcity of sources which supply trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical scene of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might help us contribute to complete the sketchy map of lexical provincialisms at the time.

The Accidents of the Soul

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-82
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medical Diagnostics ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Diagnostic Medicine ◽  
Over Time

“The Accidents of the Soul” asks which disciplines were seen to provide a knowledge of the passions in the early modern period, and how that map of the disciplines changed over time. It opens by noting the relatively minor position the passions held in a received philosophical “science of the soul,” itself divided between physics and metaphysics. As “accidents of the soul”—that is, contingent qualitative alterations in the soul—the passions lay at the margins of philosophical knowledge: they were seen as subject to too much particularity and contingency to belong to what one author called “certaine science.” They belonged instead to the “low” sciences, the practical sciences, fields that study human actions and that therefore were seen to produce a merely probable knowledge of particulars: fields like rhetoric, politics, poetics, ethics. The passions also belonged to medicine insofar as diagnostic medicine was understood as an art: in medicine, “accidents” are symptoms and the phrase “accidents of the soul” belongs to medical discourse insofar as it takes account of the particularities of the passions as part of a regimen of health. The chapter situates the seventeenth-century treatises on the passions in relation to various kinds of discourse on the passions all seen as promoting forms of probable knowledge on the model of medical diagnostics: physiology and “characterology,” most notably. It ends with a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello as a text that probes the limits—and the dangers—of this probable knowledge of the passions.

scholarly journals The International Ceramics Trade and Social Change in the Red River Delta in the Early Modern Period

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Ueda Shinya ◽  
Nishino Noriko
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
River Delta ◽  
Red River ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Red River Delta ◽  
Modern Period

Abstract Nishimura Masanari argued that the construction of enclosed-type levees caused the water level of the Red River to rise in seventeenth-century northern Vietnam, and he suggested that this phenomenon triggered social changes that brought about the establishment of Vietnamese “traditional society,” represented by the autonomous villages of the Red River Delta. Nishimura’s archaeological discussion of the transition from horseshoe-shaped levees to enclosed-type levees suggests new ways of studying socioeconomic change in early modern Vietnam. This article examines the utilization of the dry riverbed area of the Red River near Hanoi and tracks changes in the position of the levee near the neighboring villages of Bát Tràng and Kim Lan from the seventeenth century onward. The article shows that Nishimura’s argument concerning the levee network makes it possible to locate the establishment of early modern Vietnamese society in the “Age of Commerce.”

scholarly journals Sons of Something: Taxes, Lawsuits, and Local Political Control in Sixteenth-Century Castile

2007 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Drelichman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Gain Control ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Tax Exemptions ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
High Level

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the Early Modern period has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of the “crisis of the seventeenth century.” Using a new time series of nobility cases I provide the first quantitative assessment of Castilian ennoblement. Contrary to established scholarship, I find that the tax exemptions cannot alone explain the flight to privilege. My data show that the central motivation behind ennoblement was to gain control of local governments. Although ennoblement reflected a high level of redistributive activity, there is no evidence linking it to economic stagnation in Spain.

Calculating History: A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Reader of Robert Persons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/1595)

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 272-291
Author(s):  
Christopher Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Popular Ballads

Abstract This article examines one of the Bodleian Library’s copies of Robert Persons’ Elizabethan succession tract A Conference about the Next Succession that a 1650s reader has heavily annotated and used to compile a miscellany of poems and extracts from religious, political and historical works. The annotations and miscellany are concerned primarily with recent religious and political history. The reader compiles copies of popular ballads and poems, quotations from religious polemic by Catholic authors and a set of calculations of the dates of recent events in English Catholic history. This marked book serves as a case study through which to explore historical consciousness and the production of particularly Catholic forms of history and memory in the early modern period. This article seeks to query critical narratives concerning apparently combative seventeenth-century political reading practice by extending the remit of the ‘political’ to encompass different generic forms and approaches. It argues that by combining chronological and analogical perspectives this reader constructs a distinctively recusant history. An appendix identifies all of the works used by the annotator and all of the known editions or manuscripts they may have used.

Refugiés Or Émigrés? Early Modern French Migrations to British North America and the United States (c. 1680 – c. 1820)

Itinerario ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
Bertrand Van Ruymbeke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
British North America ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Gulf Of Saint Lawrence

Historians have traditionally paid relatively little attention to the French migrations to America. Although in the early modern period France was a demographic giant, had a deep – yet not enough recognized – maritime tradition, had many colonies in the Americas from the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence to the Amazon, and suffered from a tumultuous political history comparatively few of its people migrated to British North America and the United States. France has therefore and to some extent understandably enjoyed minimal visibility in the American ethnic landscape. There is, however, a long tradition of French migrations to America, beginning with the Huguenots at the end of the seventeenth century. At times these influxes were important in terms of number and influence, indeed in 1690 and in 1790 French was spoken in the streets of Charleston and of Philadelphia.

scholarly journals The Ambiguities of the Holy: Authenticating Relics in Seventeenth-Century Spain*

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina Olds
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Spanish Town

Recent scholarship has shown that, even at the heart of the Catholic world, defining holiness in the Counter-Reformation was remarkably difficult, in spite of ongoing Roman reforms meant to centralize and standardize the authentication of saints and relics. If the standards for evaluating sanctity were complex and contested in Rome, they were even less clear to regional actors, such as the Bishop of Jaén, who supervised the discovery of relics in Arjona, a southern Spanish town, beginning in 1628. The new relics presented the bishop, Cardinal Baltasar de Moscoso y Sandoval, with knotty historical, theological, and procedural dilemmas. As such, the Arjona case offers a particularly vivid example of the ambiguities that continued to complicate the assessment of holiness in the early modern period. As the Bishop of Jaén found, the authentication of relics came to involve deeper questions about the nature of theological and historical truth that were unresolved in Counter-Reformation theory and practice.

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