This style is best represented by composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 to 1594) and was written primarily for a cappella choirs without instrumentation and was always sung in Latin, the official language of the Roman Catholic Church (Robertson, "Music Through the Centuries," Internet).
During the Reformation, sacred music became very closely linked to the congregational singing of psalms and hymns in Calvinist and Lutheran churches as a way of "collectively affirming church doctrine and experience which was later adopted by Roman Catholicism" and then in the successive Evangelical revivals, such as with Methodism and Wesleyanism (Predmore, 267). At the same time, traditional polyphonic settings and themes related to the Mass and other liturgical texts was greatly extended and developed and reached its conclusion during the Baroque Period with the great Passions, motets and cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 to 1750). With the refinement of the church pipe organ in the 18th century, the composition of very elaborate chorale preludes and other organ works came about, all of which "took their place in the liturgical context of Lutheran worship" with the name of Bach standing above all other sacred music composers of the time (Blackwell, 213).
During what is known as the Romantic Period, subjective aesthetic elements slowly worked their way into sacred music. Some of the best sacred music composers linked to this period include Haydn and Mozart with their various Masses and Handel and his Oratorios, all of which became the dominant forms of religious expression and piety in the music of many Western denominations. However, many other romantic composers, such as Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn, wrote sacred church music without taking into consideration the liturgical setting of the church, meaning that some of this music was also performed in secular environments.
In the 19th century, Anglican and Orthodox churches came to create sacred music compositions under a wide variety of liturgical settings for use mainly...
...social conditioning was effected in such a way, that any thing that was considered primal, pagan, or unchristian, was frowned upon... [leading to] persecution of the Druids, Witches, Gypsy, and Jewish cultures that still continues today." Curiously, it may be that very historical hostility towards the primal which has corroded the power of Catholic sacred music and turned new catholics and protestants alike against it. In the Jewish ritual, music of
Sacred World of Slaves Based upon the reading of Sacred World of Slaves explain 3 ways in which slaves used artistic expression (music, dance, narratives) to cope with being enslaved and move them in a direction of Liberation. From slavery times, far more records about black spirituals have survived than for secular music, and the most common religious themes always involved freedom, an escape from bondage and Moses leading the children of
Music and Censorship (Question 2) The most "dangerous" aspect of art, or at least the aspect of art most threatening to entrenched power, is the way in which art is able to point out how all meaning is socially constructed, and that there is nothing inherent to reality constituting borders or boundaries of human thought or action. In order to see how this is the case, one need only look as
Suddenly Western Music no longer needed to follow all the old rules. Just as the abstract painters dispensed with the traditional canon of art at just the same time, so also men like Bartok and Stravinsky take a fresh look at what constituted good music. According to Bartok, the aesthetic success of this new homophonic-polyphonic music would depend upon the "harmonic entity" that results from the rise and fall of
It was on a Friday night, and the room was mainly made up of older individuals, although there were a few single men and some families with children. Many of them seemed to know one another well, and laughed and talked. When they approached me as a stranger, I explained what my purpose was -- to observe the use of music during services on a typical Shabbat. They told
It was in Sanskrit and Tamil and most people had a piece of paper to read from. There was a tune to it though it was more of chanting than singing. Showing fire lamps to the Gods Once the chanting was done, the priest lit a huge lamp with oil and camphor. This is then waved in front of the God in a circular motion and during this time, there is
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