Heartfelt Musicking

2018 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-62
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Johann Sebastian Bach ◽  
Spiritual Transformation ◽  
Music Making

This essay proposes a somatic archaeology of German Lutheran music making around 1700. Focusing on a single cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, it sets out to reconstruct the capacities of early modern body-souls for musical reverberation, affective contagion, and spiritual transformation.

(Re)creating the Eglantine Table

Early Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-376
Author(s):  
Katie Bank
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Domestic Interiors ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Music Books ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract The Eglantine Table at Hardwick Hall (c.1568) was probably crafted to commemorate marriages made between the Hardwick-Cavendish and Talbot families. In addition to various heraldic symbols, the table’s friezes depict gaming paraphernalia, thirteen musical instruments, and several music books, including a stacked score of a devotional song by Thomas Tallis: ‘O Lord, in thee is all my trust’. While there is thorough existing scholarship on what the Eglantine Table depicts, this article explores what can be inferred about the contemporary value of musical recreation from how meaning was produced in the table’s iconography using a ‘material approach’ to music as both an object and also a sounding body. This article demonstrates why recreation, including music-making, is defined most prominently by why people choose to engage in it and the human actions that make recreation happen. Viewed in this fresh light, the Eglantine Table, including its musical iconography and notation, offers insight into the meaning of musical recreation and the values that shaped domestic interiors, objects and social bonds in an early modern English aristocratic home.

The Music Room in Early Modern France and Italy

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Music Printing ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Social Scale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern France ◽  
Family Recreation

This book investigates the use of secular space for music-making in Early Modern France and Italy. This era is remarkable for the growing importance of music in domestic life, ranging from elaborate court festivities to family recreation. In parallel with the emergence of the theatre as a separate building type, music-making in elite circles became more specialised through the employment of paid musicians, as opposed to amateur participation by the inhabitants and their guests. Meanwhile, however, music printing and the mass-production of instruments, especially lutes, allowed music-making to diffuse down the social scale. The book shows how spaces specifically designed for music began to appear in private dwellings, while existing rooms became adapted for the purpose. At first, the number of rooms specifically identifiable as ‘music rooms’ was very small, but gradually, over the following 150 years, specialised music rooms began to appear in larger residences in both France and Italy. A major theme of the book is the relationship between the size and purpose of the room and the kinds of music performed – depending on the size, portability and loudness of different instruments; the types of music suited to spaces of different dimensions; the role of music in dancing and banqueting; and the positions of players and listeners. Musical instruments were often elaborately decorated to become works of art in their own right.

Turnings: Motion and Emotion in the Labyrinths of Early Modern Amsterdam

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-61
Author(s):  
Angela Vanhaelen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Spiritual Transformation ◽  
Strong Connection

Amsterdam’s Doolhoven, or labyrinths, constituted recreational spaces that also forged a strong connection between theatricality and a secular conversional experience by drawing on the idea of the labyrinth as an allegory for progression toward spiritual transformation. The chapter explores both the performative and philosophical components of these early modern labyrinths and the deeper meaning of their many ludic tricks.

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