Investigations into relations of “light” and “learned music” of the English late Renaissance

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Alexander Lotzow
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 574753269

The thesis is dedicated to historical popular music research grounded in social and cultural history, while simultaneously seeking to consider analytically oriented music historiography concerned emphatically with the history art as well. Taking England around 1600 as an example, it analyses, focussed on a special local-temporal constellation that emerges almost like a laboratory setting (before crossing the threshold to the basso continuo age), changing legitimation strategies of music with regard to their semantic-semiotic foundations (especially in the rejection of traditional concepts of mimesis in the spirit of comprehensive humanisation narratives), their interaction with literary poetics (some of which directly touch on social dimensions, also on gender issues), and the emergence of changing political and social spheres of agency (here, especially, the secondary effects of the English Reformation decidedly on secular, rather than sacred, music). By relating competing music-theoretical and ontological approaches to social constellations, an adaptation of traditional musical concepts in discourse and composition history becomes philologically and analytically tangible. The starting point is Thomas Morley’s conceptual codification of a European “light music” and, following successful cultural transfer from the Mediterranean art and music discourse, its specifically English conceptualization confronting traditional musical concepts. What is essential is the implied double concept of the “light/learned” dichotomy as, initially, a categorical, but then also as a relational tool of differentiation: It promotes the system-theoretical concept of re-entry, the notion of reintroducing a primary difference into the differentiated, which represents a central heuristic tool for the study, especially for the composition-historical treatment of the field, since it allows for the observation of multiple, staggered and mirrored realisations of the basic distinction, not merely of a linear stratification. What becomes visible are different, recursively interrelated décors of production, which correspond to the social imperatives, ambitions for differentiation, and upward mobility of the newly emerging middle and upper classes through cultural activity. Since music literature, including Morley himself, does not provide a compositional-historical conceptualisation in the sense of a structural foundation for “light music”, the close readings of the study serve an inductive function in that they establish the basis for further study, both beyond the text itself and within it. Thus, after the exemplary treatment of vocal and instrumental compositional fields (consort song, fantasy, madrigal, dance forms), the final chapter on the Ayre provides a conclusive thematic focus of the thesis based on a specific genre that has so far been barely explored in compositional historiography.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants