Marianne C.E. Gillion (Uppsala University)
In the wake of the Reformation, scholars and singers set about crafting liturgies and creating books for the new orders of service. A central component of the work of those editors was to revise the traditional music of the mass and the office: plainchant. Chant functioned as a sonic expression of communal religious identities; its adaptation and the continued use were essential to the success of new liturgies. Printed sources of protestant plainchant, however, still remain at the peripheries of musical and book historical scholarship.
This paper explores individuation and exchange in a series of publications issued in Nuremberg and meant for Riga. In 1548, the Nuremberg firm Berg and Neuber published a collection of music for the revised office edited by the reformer Sebald Heyden, the Liber Canticorum. It inspired a subsequent collection by the same firm simply entitled Responsoria in 1550. A similar volume of office music—Antiphonae—was produced for Riga between 1548 and 1549. All of these collections were revised and reissued throughout the 16th and early 17th centuries. The analyses of the production, contents, and reception of those volumes provides a new perspective on the movement of books and music in the first generations of the Reformation.Peripheral Plainchant? Musical Individuation and Exchange in Editions from Nuremberg and Riga