Project Details
Projekt
The Early Mass in Music History Between Liturgical Function and Art
Subject Area
Musicology
Term
from 2015 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269880813
In this project the setting of the mass, the central musical genre of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, will be systematically reassessed. As a complementary extension to the traditional analysis of individual works and histories of musical style, there will be worked on a wide empirical basis, considering the connections between musical material and liturgical purpose. The aim is to develop a new methodological matrix for the interpretation of early polyphonic masses that takes both histories of ritual and piety and compositional perspectives into account. The project will be divided into three stages. In the first, a database we began constructing in preparation for this work will be completed and then expanded. This database already contains every surviving mass of the era in question and includes information about provenance, modern editions and secondary literature. It will be refined by adding textual, musical and formal parameters. On this basis, in stage two, three doctoral theses and/[or] postdoctoral projects will examine three mass corpora each emerging from clearly defined spatial, contextual or textual frameworks, considering musical reflection and reaction to these contexts. Finally, in stage three, the project leaders (in cooperation with a historian of liturgy) will write a monograph on the history of the mass based on the database and further contextual investigations. This monograph will offer a wider history of the mass around the following points: approaches to pre-existing musical material, parsing of the mass texts, additions of aesthetic value, differences between confessions, transfer of repertoire and relations to architectural space. Modul 4 is dedicated to interdisciplinary workshops on liturgical questions.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
Cooperation Partners
Professor Dr. Ansgar Franz; Dr. Albert Gräf
