Printed Organ Sermons in Germany From 1600 to 1800: Catalogue, Data Input, Interpretation

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katelijne Schiltz
• Subject Area: Musicology ; Protestant Theology ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 314673861

With a hundred or so prints, dating from between 1600 and 1800, organ sermons constitute a hitherto disregarded repertory of sources. The sermons, which were held at the occasion of the inauguration of a new organ, touch upon a great variety of issues in the field of German protestant church music during the Baroque. The emergence of the genre is intimately related to the “ritual Reformation”, which in the era of confessionalisation aimed at a consolidation of the liturgical adiaphora. In terms of contents, the texts are primarily concerned with the justification of the liturgical usage of the organ in particular, and polyphonic and instrumental music in general. The subject of music, as it appears in the bible and in ecclesiastical history, is now developed under the auspices of a protestant-Christian historiography, while the theological value of music receives Support from the music theory of that time. The musical aesthetics of the Middle Ages and Humanism are carried on in these sources, and the continuities exist until well into the eighteenth century. During the first phase of the project, we developed a digital research platform, which documents all known organ sermons and presents them in full text format with extensive commentaries(https://orgelpredigt.ur.de/). The platform is connected with other online databases and contains, in addition to the text editions, a wealth of entries about people, organs, places, events and sources that are relevant to the organ sermons. Work in libraries and archives was necessary in order to document the materiality of the prints as well as the chronological andgeographical dissemination of the texts. In several publications we could demonstrate the role of theologians for a transfer of Knowledge of musical topics. At an international conference, to be held in May 2019, scholars from various disciplines will discuss the theological and musico-historical implications of the project’s results. One session will be devoted to the circulation of organ sermons throughout Europe. The challenge of conceiving a database that is specially geared to the research topic on the one hand, and the wealth ofsources and discoveries on various levels on the other result in the fact that at the end of the current project phase (31 October 2019), we will have published only 38 out of 70 works. The aim of the present proposal is to publish the remaining 32 sermons and thus to make thewhole corpus available online. The full panorama of sermons will be able to demonstrate the genesis and dissemination of a Musical aesthetics through the lens of theologians that had a profound influence in Germany until well into the eighteenth century. As the texts as well as the database are already available and ready to use, this aim can be reached by means of considerably reduced personnel and non-personnal costs.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants