Maartje De Wilde (University of Antwerp)  -  Merriness and misfortune in songbooks from the Southern Netherlands

During the 17th-century, hundreds of new songbooks were published in the Low Countries. Young and old, male and female, rich and poor; everyone who wanted to sing, could find a songbook that agreed with his taste and financial standards.  In this presentation I would like to have a closer look at a particular group of those songbooks, viz. the secular ones that were published in Dutch, in the Southern part of the Low Countries (now Flanders, Belgium). In order to answer the question whom these small songbooks were intended for, we need to consider several viewpoints. What do we learn from the preliminary statements, written by authors, printers and fellow authors? Or, what does a comparison with song manuscripts tell us? Whereas printed songbooks do not share much information about their owners, manuscripts often do. Some of the songs have been preserved both in print and in manuscript, and therefore they provide us with an understanding of the people who used to sing them. Archival records can also be of help in determining who the buyers of those songbooks were.   On the other hand, we cannot neglect the content of the books because it can also teach us about the public the books were meant for. Everyday life is mirrored in those early modern songbooks; the question is: what do we see when we look into that mirror? What do the songs themselves tell us about the kind of people who used to sing? And what about the contexts in which those songbooks were used?

Louis Peter Grijp (Meertens Instituut & University of Utrecht)  -  Dutch songbooks from the 18th century

During the last decades scholars have spent much attention on the Dutch singing culture of the 17th century, which was not only a Golden Age of painting but also of informal singing. In the Dutch Republic hundreds of songbooks were published, secular as well as sacred. In the 18th century, this singing practice seems to have been continued, although so far it has not been studied very well. In this lecture some of the most popular secular printed songbooks of the period will be investigated, such as Apolloos Giften (Apollo’s Gifts), Thyrsis Minnewit (The Aim of Thyrsis’s Love) and Jan van Elsland’s Gezangen (Songs). Questions addressed are for which circles these books were intended and how they were used.

Session 3 - Religious music

Sylvie Granger (Université du Maine)  -   Musiciens et musiciennes d'église en France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: une enquête prosopographique ambitieuse

Au début de la Révolution française (en 1790), de très nombreux musiciens employés par les églises capitulaires et par les abbayes perdent leur emploi. Afin d’obtenir des secours, ils rédigent alors des requêtes, et parfois constituent des dossiers dans lesquels ils présentent leur cas et plaident leur cause. Cela constitue un corpus de sources très riches, conservées à Paris et sur l’ensemble du territoire français. Malgré la difficulté due à cette dispersion géographique, une vaste enquête est actuellement menée par une équipe française de recherche, sous la direction du professeur Bernard Dompnier (Université de Clermont-Ferrand), dans le cadre d’un projet soutenu par l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche. Le but est de constituer une vaste base de données prosopographiques, qui sera utilisable pour d'’innombrables travaux thématiques. On estime que cette base rassemblera à terme trois milliers de musiciens et musiciennes actifs en 1790. Elle permet du même coup de jeter un regard rétrospectif sur la vie musicale de l’essentiel du XVIIIe siècle. Sylvie Granger présentera les principales sources utilisées et la base de données, puis donnera un aperçu des premiers résultats, en particulier concernant la place des femmes dans ce monde de la musique d’Église du XVIIIe siècle.

At the beginning of the French Revolution (in 1790), a very large number of musicians employed by capitular churches or abbeys lost their jobs. In order to obtain relief they then drew up petitions, sometimes assembling a full dossier, in which they presented their situation and pleaded their case. This makes up a corpus of very rich sources, kept in Paris and all over France. In spite of the difficulty coming from this geographical dispersion, a large inquiry is presently conducted by a French research team, under Professor Bernard Dompnier (Université de Clermont-Ferrand), within the framework of a project supported by the A.N.R (Agence Nationale de la Recherche). The aim is to constitute a wide base of prosopographical data, meant to be used for innumerable works branching out of it. It is estimated that this database will in time include some three thousand musicians - both men and women - at work in 1790. The database will also make it possible to have a look backward at the musical life of most of the 18th century. Sylvie Granger (Université du Maine) will present the main sources used and the database, after which she will give an outline of the first results, particularly concerning the place of women in this 18th-century world of church music.

Stefanie Beghein (University of Antwerp) - Church music and funeral practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Antwerp

Although baroque funeral practices have already been subject of several historical studies, both in general and in particular focusing on the Antwerp casus, the position of music in these funeral practices remains terra incognita . However, funeral music appears to matter in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Antwerp . In 1685, a royal ordinance was published on demand of the magistrate of Antwerp in order to regulate the funeral practices in the city, aiming a "redres vande excessen ende abusen die dagelyckx ghebeuren ende gebeurt zyn in't faict van Begraeffenissen ende Uyt-vaerden". The ordinance was based on earlier funeral regulations also introduced new restrictions for the use of showy items such as flaming torches and music. The proposed paper seeks to contextualize these official musical limitations and will assess the conspicuous funeral practices in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Antwerp , with special attention for the role of music in the realization of baroque funeral pomp and circumstance. What were the customs in Antwerp upper-class funerals before 1685? To what extent did the regulations affect these practices? And what can the evolving funeral fashions, both in general and with specific regard to music, tell us about socio-cultural or religious transformations?  

Tanya Kevorkian (Millersville University)  -  The church, the street, the tower, and the home as sites of religious music-making in urban baroque Germany

Performance practice

Joshua Rifkin (The Bach Ensemble & Boston University)  -  Time travel and its discontents: historical performance, historical reconstruction, and culture tourism  

Mediating between the past and the present has always presented a challenge to practitioners of Early Music. If they no longer face the charges of historical escapism, or even fetishism, that once bedeviled their existence, the recognition of how much they reflect predilections very much of our own time brings its new questions and problems. To what extent do we seek to “recreate history”; to what extent do we choose to ignore it? Does our interest focus on contexts or on works — or does it do so differently under different circumstances, and if so, why? “Sound of the City 18” — an event rooted simultaneously in an existing place and a vanished time — offers an appropriate opportunity to consider these issues.