Description: What did the term 'author' denote for Lutheran musicians in the generations between Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach? As part of the Musical Performance and Reception series, this book examines attitudes to authorship as revealed in the production, performance and reception of music in seventeenth-century German lands. Analysing a wide array of archival, musical, philosophical and theological texts, this study illuminates notions of creativity in the period and the ways in which individuality was projected and detected in printed and manuscript music. Its investigation of musical ownership and regulation shows how composers appealed to princely authority to protect their publications, and how town councils sought to control the compositional efforts of their church musicians. Interpreting authorship as a dialogue between authority and individuality, this book uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore changing attitudes to the self in the era between Schütz and Bach.
Brief description: Stephen Rose is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach (Cambridge, 2011) and editor of Leipzig Church Music from the Sherard Collection (2014), he is also the co-editor of the journal Early Music.
Review Quotes: 'Rose provides both an investigation of authorship in the period and-even more usefully-an innovative and fruitful starting point for understanding the musical culture of the time ... the book is invaluable in deepening our understanding of seventeenth-century creativity.' Daniel R. Melamed, BACH