CRC 496 B8 - Forms of Symbolic Communication in Mass Scoring of the 15th to the 17th Century (SFB 496)

Basic data for this project

Description

The polyphonic mass of the 15th to 17th century was a liturgical ritual, a musical artefact, a medium of representation and of symbolic communication. It formed a reliable instrument for efficient public-oriented communication and musical transformation of political, religious and artificial contents and values. Project B8 is carrying out basic research into the respective forms and limits of these communication processes using representative mass scorings from courts and their periphiery in the period investigated and their contextual sources. The project concentrates on three main research fields: The adoption of the liturgical ritual as a form of political mise-en-scène, for example to depict musically the representation and reputation of secular and ecclesiastic rulers; phenomena of symbolic communication with religious or theological implications which served to project musically specific forms of liturgy and piety of the time; and finally artificial mass scorings or more specifically, such mass scorings which have recourse to musical and iconographical parameters and their figurative illustrations - such as purposefully instrumentalized techniques of composition and figurative elements - and which are studied by means of selected original sources of masses from the period under study as forms of symbolic communication.