16th-Century Soloistic Instrumental Music in the South Germam Cultural Region

The projects main objective is an interdisciplinary investigation of the earliest pure instrumental music for solo keyboard instruments and lutes in the present-day Austrian, Swiss and South German region (Vienna, Basel, Munich, Augsburg, Regensburg and Nuremberg). The study should answer the questions as to which musical determinants were underlying the written-down 16th-century instrumental pieces and in what way it would be legitimate to speak of pieces rather than of improvisation. A music piece, in order to be handed down, should have some kind of repeatable complex of characteristics. But there was not yet at the time any written tradition for these pieces. It is probable that (a) new thought patterns arose in instrumental music corresponding to the new written culture and that (b) these artworks were directly tied to the overall system of thought from the period before 1600, i.e., that they reproduced amongst other things rhetorical principles. The project aims to develop the methods of music analyses based on interdisciplinary research: examination of the humanistic literature in its cultural-historical context, the rhetorical sources, inter alia; investigated is whether the intertextual methodological approaches to the autonomous, notated 16th-century instrumental pieces are applicable. Relevant for the examination is a contextual analysis of the text-musical forms of music-making in the 15th and 16th centuries as well. The project has three parts: The creation of a material base: a relational database of genuinely soloistic 16 th- century instrumental music from regions pertinent to the project (I). The investigation of musical determinants, their development and functions, in the first notated autonomous instrumental compositions (II). The analysis of this music from the perspective of Renaissance rhetorico-poetical principles and in terms of the sources of the relevant humanist circles; the search for possible narrative models or parallels (III). The results should complement the music history of Vienna and environs. The impact of the humanistic cultural circle around Hapsburg Residences and universities on the 16th-century soloistic instrumental music in the southern German-speaking region should be clarified for the first time. The project will work out new analytical methods applicable to instrumental music before 1600. This will thereby make it possible to answer: how does musical thinking function in the earliest genuine instrumental music? Did it deal with any kind of stereotypes or were the autonomous instrumental pieces in fact autonomous? Clarified will be whether musical logic in instrumental music was influenced by the other arts (rhetoric). For the first time the autonomous soloistic instrumental music will be analysed in a historic and analytical complex. For the first time it will have interdisciplinary consideration. Through the planned database the project results will quickly be made available and useable for scholarship and praxis.

The Project 16th-Century Soloistic Instrumental Music in the South German Cultural Region (M 2062) was the first stage of a research project and is currently being continued in the follow-up Elise-Richter FWF-project Soloistic Instrumental Music in the Central European Cultural Region (1500-1550) (V661). The previously unexplored manuscripts from the period 1500-1550 have now been deciphered and transcribed for further research. For the first time, instrumental music was examined in dialogue with Humanistic education, philology and the entire humanistic culture in the first half of the 16th century. The first results are extraordinarily fruitful for musicology as well as for other disciplines. The manuscripts were historically rearranged, indexes and concordances added, the functions of all entries and sketches clarified. It was discovered that many instrumental entries have the functions of rhetorical commonplaces. The tablatures were often used as humanistic notebooks, in which literary and musical sententiae were collected in parallel. The techniques of musical intabulation were explained, they proved to be integrated into the communication of "foreign", "quoted" and "own" texts known from the humanistic canon. Analogies were found between humanistic and musical productivity (in written text or notes as well as in improvised speech or musical contribution) were established. As an essential aspect of the research, the question of the media presence of tablatures in the relationship 'manuscript - print' was formulated, because many tablatures existed as prototypes of printed textbooks. This in turn led to the problem of the social status of tablatures and to the mechanisms of the writing of instrumental music in the first half of the 16th century, about which nothing was known so far. There were numerous concrete parallels between musical contributions and humanistic theatre and school exercises. In the course of the Meitner project, 9 publications were written and the results were presented and discussed at 17 conferences and research forums. A database was created. A workshop with students and practicing musicians was held at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Basel, (Switzerland). The music from one of the researched manuscripts (UKR-Lvu 1400/I) was recorded on CD and vinyl record (Germany).