Prohibited Music

Below is an abstract of what looks like a very interesting article, sent along to me by CMAAer Patrick Bergin. (I don’t know the DiLasso motet mentioned in the abstract, but of course now I want to go look it up.)

I’m sure the article will provide interesting reading. But makes me wonder even more about just how much of what we hear and sing at Mass is “circumstantial.” I got myself involved a thread on NLM the other day in which I brought up the following point: just how easy is it to throw out music? Of all art forms, isn’t it the most dispensable? A painting sticks around and makes for a lot of smoke in a bonfire if you want to dispose of it. A stained glass window? Pretty hard to get rid of and have no one notice. Music? It’s in the air! It only exists in time – for a time – and then it’s gone. You can hire a hit man to take care of your organist or choir director, burn a few books, and that’s it! It’s like it never existed.

“A Sixteenth-Century Catalog of Prohibited Music”
David Crook
Journal of the American Musicological Society Apr 2009, Vol. 62, No. 1: 1–78

In 1575 the Jesuit general in Rome issued an ordinance governing the use of music in the order’s rapidly expanding network of colleges. Motets, masses, hymns, “and other pious compositions” were to be retained; indecent and “vain” music was to be burned. Sixteen years later the Jesuits’ provincial administrator in Bavaria drew up a set of supplemental instructions, to which was appended a catalog of prohibited music as well as a complementary list of approved compositions (D-Mbs Clm 9237). Verbal texts treating drunkenness and erotic love account for the majority of banned pieces, but in some cases—a setting of the first verse of Psalm 137 by Orlando di Lasso, for example—the sound and style of the music led to its prohibition.

Although intended for all colleges within the Jesuits’ Upper German province, this catalog apparently derives solely from a review of the music collection of Munich’s college on the occasion of its move in 1591 to a magnificent new building financed by the duke of Bavaria. Like the architecture and curriculum of the college, the music catalog reflected Bavaria’s new understanding of its role as principal post-Tridentine defender of the true faith. And, like the formal confessions of faith, catechisms, and service books promulgated by Europe’s Churches during the late sixteenth century, Bavaria’s catalog of prohibited music gave expression to an ideology of difference and exclusion that lies at the very heart of post-Reformation Christianity.