Soloistic Instrumental Music in the Central European Cultural Region (1500-1550)

The project answers the questions: Where was a textless (instrumental) composition heard in the life of people of the first half of the 16th century? What is the function of a short idiomatic instrumental composition in the music life of this period? What then did the tablature (the manuscript with instrumental music) user expect? How were the recorded examples of autonomous compositions read? Autonomous soloistic instrumental compositions and sketches from not yet investigated tablatures are to be explored, transcribed, annotated, and made available in the database. The focus is on the South German language area, especially on the Viennese region as one of the important cultural centres and transfer sites. In the project, the humanistic culture basis commonplace praxis is first developed as a basic method for the analysis of instrumental music before 1600. Student notebooks, notebooks for home use, or textbooks which tablatures frequently were are rich in evidence of the commonplace humanistic culture. The project explains the compositional and improvisational technique of the autonomous instrumental music and radically changes our analysis of instrumental music before 1600 and our ideas about the repertoire. For the first time, the bourgeois soloistic instrumental praxis of the first half of the 16th century, pertaining to its various social strata (court scholars, student circles and beginners) and accounting for the functions of extant source types (manuscripts with print prototypes and commonplace books) and in the context of media change (manuscriptprint) will be investigated. For the first time, correlated performance and compositional practices as well as didactics will be interdisciplinary elucidated.