AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts sunday morning 177
SOUND, SPACE, AND CATHOLIC IDENTITY IN THE
GERMAN LITANY OF THE COUNTER-REFORMATION
Alex Fisher
University of British Columbia
Music and sound were vital means of defining religious space and etching confessional
boundaries in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Germany. While Protestant communities
had long cultivated vernacular religious song to express their confessional identity,
Catholic elites also used sound—including music, bell ringing, and gunfire—to augment
rituals dramatizing confessional differences, particularly urban theatrical processions and pilgrimages
whose shrines and routes defined the Catholic confessional landscape. As the genre
of prayer and music most closely connected to thaumaturgical ideas of sanctoral intercession,
the litany was the most distinctive and widespread musical marker of Catholic identity in
Counter-Reformation Germany. Ranging from simple monophonic intonations and responses
to elaborate polyphonic compositions by composers like Orlando di Lasso and Giovanni
Pierluigi da Palestrina, litanies were widely disseminated and found the most varied uses in
Catholic ritual.
Despite its ubiquity in German Catholic devotional practice around the turn of the seventeenth
century, the litany north of the Alps has largely eluded scholarly attention. This paper
explores the litany as an aural medium for the definition of Catholic space, and focuses on
three aspects in particular. First, litanies lent a distinctive sonic profile to Catholic processions
in urban areas: together with military music and gunfire, the characteristic call-and-response
form of litanies helped to appropriate Catholic space aggressively in majority-Protestant
cities like Augsburg and Regensburg, even if only for a short time. Second, litanies were a
fundamental sonic component of pilgrimages that traced the sacred geography of Catholic
Germany. The rhythm of intonation and response regulated the movement of the pilgrims
across rural landscapes, and in turn influenced the structure of vernacular songs that were
sung as the marchers approached their holy destinations. Third, the litany’s inherent structure
encouraged composers of polyphonic settings to shape interior spaces aurally by exploiting
polychoral effects, often mimicking the prayer’s spatial separation of intonation and response.
Several examples will be drawn from the largest contemporary printed anthology of the genre,
the Thesaurus litaniarum (“Treasury of Litanies”), published in Munich in 1596 by Georg Victorinus
(d. c. 1632), music director at the Munich Jesuit college and church of St. Michael.
Compiling dozens of settings of Christological, Marian, and Sanctoral litanies by Lasso, Palestrina,
and other lesser-known contemporaries, Victorinus dedicated his collection to the
Jesuit-organized Marian Congregations, which helped to stoke popular Catholic devotion in
Germany from the 1580s onward. The stylistic range of the Thesaurus—spanning the simplest
falsobordone formulas to massive quasi-polychoral settings for up to twelve voices—suggests
the remarkable versatility of the litany in Catholic devotional culture and its vitality as a distinctive
“confessional” genre in a fragmented religious landscape.