German organ sermon prints cataloged
The Institute of Musicology at the University of Regensburg is launching a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on the subject of "German organ sermon prints between 1600 and 1800 - cataloging, text recording, evaluation".
The team led by Katelijne Schiltz, Professor of Musicology at the University of Regensburg, has set itself the goal of scientifically analyzing a collection of around 90 German-language sermon texts from the 17th and 18th centuries. The project, which will run for three years, deals with a group of sources that has been little researched to date.
The texts are geographically widely scattered, mostly unique prints, which are now to be recorded bibliographically for the first time and made publicly available as full texts in a digital research portal on the website of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Regensburg. Over the next three years, the musicologists will index the sources and compile profiles of the authors and instruments.
Katelijne Schiltz places the project in a larger research context: "The evaluation of the prints is of particular importance for a panorama of the Protestant organ landscape. Numerous texts address the history of the consecrated instrument, provide information on its disposition and reveal the cultural-sociological background of its construction in hitherto little-known local contexts."
Another academic focus of the project will be the analysis of the texts from the perspective of knowledge transfer. For the first time, the role of theologians in the dissemination of musical knowledge can be systematically examined on the basis of the material. Of interest are both the personal networks that were established between the sermon authors and the precise radius of music-theoretical scholarship that was binding in this genre. Exemplary results of the project will be presented for discussion at an interdisciplinary workshop in 2019.
