Italian Traces in Musical Culture at Wettin Courts during the Sixteenth Century

• Applicant: Dr. Michael Chizzali
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 255039864

The project examines little-known or up to now uninvestigated ways of transferring, distributing and receiving Italian music and musical culture at representative courts of Ernestine and Albertine Wettins during the sixteenth century. The Wettin courts (in particular those of the electors) seem to be most suitable, because in the course of their cultural evolution since 1500 a striking continuity of (well-documented) musical transmission from Italy is noticeable. Starting from a wide-ranging concept of »court music« (which is recommended by the variety of contexts), decisive phenomena of this primarily unidirectional (i.e. from the south to the north) intercultural communication should be discussed. Amongst others, these concern constellations of source funding and musical traditions associated with close music-political background (for instance, relating to the concentration of Italian styles in certain mass repertoire of the Jena Choirbooks or to the »Italian« music in the prints of Georg Rhaw), not-hitherto reflected stylistic and technical peculiarities (e.g. the subtle treatment and adoption of lighter Italian genres in the Saxon-Thuringian countries from the second half of the sixteenth century) or also close cultural interlinkings such as the triangular-relationship Florence-Dresden-Prague around the decades of 1600. The aim of the project is to question and to extend the functional connections and their historico-cultural contexts regarding the multi-layered relations of Wettin court cultures to Italian music, to explore new relevant sources and hitherto scarcely noted courts (for example, relating to the fluctuating musical environment of the Ernestine court in Weimar) as well as to investigate neglected or unknown aesthetic discourses concerning foreign-music reception in Middle Germany from the end of the Middle Ages to the eve of Thirty Years War.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants