Global Music and Religious Orders in the Early Modern Era

What role did music play in early-modern religious missions? How did religious orders and Indigenous communities react to and understand different types of music in this era of global encounters and interactions? These questions were centre stage in this three-day conference at which twenty-three delegates presented their research at the Abdij van Park just outside Leuven, and at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) in Brussels. The manifold ways in which music influenced religious missions formed a prominent thread throughout the proceedings. In the conference’s first paper, Daniele V. Filippi (Università di Torino) probed the knowledge, often tacit and unwritten, that lay behind the use of music in early-modern Jesuit missions. For Filippi, the abundance of music sponsored by the Society of Jesus lay counter to reservations about its use, as epitomized by Jesuit Florian Paucke (1719–1779), who decried mission-ary music for prioritizing aesthetic beauty over spiritual weight. The tensions between organizational cohesion and adaptation to local circumstances were the central question of a paper by Céline Drèze (Sorbonne Université; Institut de Recherche en Musicologie), which examined practices of copying for litany settings that circulated amongst Jesuit sodalities, particularly in northern France and the southern Netherlands. Drèze noted that devotional models in litany settings were adapted to specific contexts in order to cater to local communities. A conscious adaptation to time and place also formed the crux of the presentation by Christoph Riedo (Université de Genève), which examined the transmission of notated European music – in this instance, motets by Johann Melchior Gletle (1626–1683)