Music and Religious Identity in the Reformation

Chiara Bertoglio has written a series of articles about music during the Reformation era for Mercatornet based upon her book Reforming Music. In one article, she notes that Catholics and Protestants used music against each other in public or in parody. During processions, Catholics would sing hymns or litanies and the Protestants would disrupt the gathering by singing their own hymns. They wrote contrafactions--changing the words to a song--against each other, etc.

Her more than 800-page book presents a vast range of information about musical styles, development, and uses among the different religious communities, from Luther's Germany to Calvin's Geneva to Tudor England, and of course Tridentine Catholic liturgical music in Rome:

Five hundred years ago a monk nailed his theses to a church gate in Wittenberg. The sound of Luther’s mythical hammer, however, was by no means the only aural manifestation of the religious Reformations.

This book describes the birth of Lutheran Chorales and Calvinist Psalmody; of how music was practised by Catholic nuns, Lutheran schoolchildren, battling Huguenots, missionaries and martyrs, cardinals at Trent and heretics in hiding, at a time when Palestrina, Lasso and Tallis were composing their masterpieces, and forbidden songs were concealed, smuggled and sung in taverns and princely courts alike.

Music expressed faith in the Evangelicals’ emerging worships and in the Catholics’ ancient rites; through it new beliefs were spread and heresy countered; analysed by humanist theorists, it comforted and consoled miners, housewives and persecuted preachers; it was both the symbol of new, conflicting identities and the only surviving trace of a lost unity of faith.

The music of the Reformations, thus, was music reformed, music reforming and the reform of music: this book shows what the Reformations sounded like, and how music became one of the protagonists in the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century.