Music in the History of the Western Church: With an Introduction on Religious Music Among Primitive and Ancient PeoplesDickinson, Edward
History
Music in the History of the Western Church: With an Introduction on Religious Music Among Primitive and Ancient Peoples
Dickinson, Edward
Church music
In the fourteenth century appeared the device which played so large a
part in the production of the Reformation hymns—that of adapting secular
tunes to religious poems, and also making religious paraphrases of
secular ditties. Praises of love, of out-door sport, even of wine, by a
few simple alterations were made to express devotional sentiments. A good
illustration of this practice is the recasting of the favorite folk-song,
“Den liepsten Bulen den ich han,” into “Den liepsten Herren den ich han.”
Much more common, however, was the transfer of melodies from profane
poems to religious, a method which afterward became an important reliance
for supplying the reformed congregations with hymn-tunes.
Mixed songs, part Latin and part German, were at one time much in vogue.
A celebrated example is the
“In dulce jubilo
Nu singet und seyt fro”
of the fourteenth century, which has often been heard in the reformed
churches down to a recent period.
In the fifteenth century the popular religious song flourished with an
affluence hardly surpassed even in the first two centuries of
Protestantism. Still under the control of the Catholic doctrine and
discipline, it nevertheless betokens a certain restlessness of mind; the
native individualism of the German spirit is preparing to assert itself.
The fifteenth was a century of stir and inquiry, full of premonitions of
the upheaval soon to follow. The Revival of Learning began to shake
Germany, as well as Southern and Western Europe, out of its superstition
and intellectual subjection. The religious and political movements in
Bohemia and Moravia, set in motion by the preaching and martyrdom of Hus,
produced strong effect in Germany. Hus struck at some of the same abuses
that aroused the wrath of Luther, notably the traffic in indulgences. The
demand for the use of the vernacular in church worship was even more
fundamental than the similar desire in Germany, and preceded rather than
followed the movement toward reform. Hus was also a prototype of Luther
in that he was virtually the founder of the Bohemian hymnody. He wrote
hymns both in Latin and in Czech, and earnestly encouraged the use of
vernacular songs by the people. The Utraquists published a song-book in
the Czech language in 1501, and the Unitas Fratrum one, containing four
hundred hymns, in 1505. These two antedated the first Lutheran hymn-book
by about twenty years. The Bohemian reformers, like Luther after them,
based their poetry upon the psalms, the ancient Latin hymns, and the old
vernacular religious songs; they improved existing texts, and set new
hymns in place of those that contained objectionable doctrinal features.
Their tunes also were derived, like those of the German reformers, from
older religious and secular melodies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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