Of Music, Morals, and Salads:The Uses of Harmony in Imperial Prague (original) (raw)

Abstract

(forthcoming in Common Knowledge, https://www.dukeupress.edu/common-knowledge) In 1581, Mateo Flecha the Younger—chaplain to Empress Maria of Spain—oversaw the publication in Prague of vernacular polyphony by “diverse authors,” along with a few pieces of his own. He called the motley collection Las Ensaladas in a nod to its piquant mixture of poetic meters, rhetorical registers, and sacred and profane topoi. The title also captures the diverse musical styles animating the texts. The sacred-secular binary typically invoked to account for these celebrated sonic “salads” thus obscures their manifold resonances for the literati who sang them. I argue that unmarked juxtapositions and generic fluidity of Flecha's "musical salads," along with another Prague collection, Jacobus Handl's "harmonious morals (Harmoniae morales, 1589–90), were in fact essential to this music’s effectiveness as a medium for moral instruction and pious reflection in multilingual, multi-confessional Central Europe. Gastronomic specifications in the statutes for a collegium musicum formed in Prague in 1616 clarify the uses, and limits, of harmony on the eve of the Thirty Years War.

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