Can I read Music in the Margin of Indifference: J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion on EtoBox?

Music in the Margin of Indifference: J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion by Bettina Varwig is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Music in the Margin of Indifference: J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion about?

This chapter considers the role of a specific Lutheran idea of freedom in the emancipation of sacred music from liturgy during the early modern period. It proposes that the Lutheran appropriation of the classical notion of ‘adiaphora’, as a stance of indifference towards practices and objects not essential for salvation, opened up a quasi-autonomous space for musical elaboration, within which music could gradually acquire its modern status as a self-sufficient artistic practice. The eighteenth-century tradition of Passion performances in Protestant Germany offers a rich test case for this process of ecclesiastical divestment, in particular J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion of 1727, which made claims for music that clearly outstripped its functional remit, and Carl Heinrich Graun’s immensely popular setting of Karl Wilhelm Ramler’s Der Tod Jesu of 1755, which consolidated the genre’s move from the liturgy to the concert hall. Yet this migration outside the church walls by no means provides straightforward confirmation of a standard secularization narrative of Western modernity. Rather, in absorbing and retaining crucial aspects of sacrality, these musical repertories and practices rev

Author

Bettina Varwig

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published

2021

Language

EN