1st Edition

Music, Piety, and Political Power in 17th-Century Salzburg The Sounds of Good Government

By Kimberly Beck Hieb Copyright 2025
    164 Pages 52 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Music, Piety, and Political Power in 17th-Century Salzburg traces the role of sacred music in the service of politics at the archbishopric of Salzburg, one of many jurisdictions that made up the Holy Roman Empire in the second half of the 17th century.

    The author reveals that the use of music to present political, cultural, and religious meanings was not limited to cross-confessional communities, the Imperial capital of Vienna, or other early modern metropolitan centers such as Munich and Paris.

    Presenting music as a powerful cultural artifact that informs our understanding of the religious and political relationships shaping the history of central Europe, this study expands our understanding of the history of music, absolutism, and Catholicism in the 17th century and will be of interest to scholars working in those areas.

    Acknowledgements

    Chapter 1 – Introduction: The Sounds of “Good” Government

    Chapter 2 – Making Use of Materials on Hand: Sacred Music under Guidobald von Thun (r. 1654––1668)

    Chapter 3 – The Massive and the Individual: Sacred Music under Maximilian Gandolph (r. 1668–1687)

    Chapter 4 – Sacred Dramas, Music by Outsiders, and a Return to the Psalms: Sacred Music under Johann Ernst (r. 1687–1709)

    Conclusion: Sacred Music as Cultural, Religious, and Political Artifact

    Index

    Biography

    Kimberly Beck Hieb is associate professor of musicology at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas, USA. Her 17th-century research takes up questions of religious and political representation in early modern sacred music and has been supported in part by a Fulbright Research Fellowship, the Austrian Exchange Agency, and a Eugene K. Wolf travel grant from the American Musicological Society. She is the author of a critical edition of Andreas Hofer’s Ver sacrum seu flores musici (Salzburg 1677) (2021), and “Music for Martyrs: Sacred Music and the Particular Piety of Late Seventeenth-Century Salzburg” (2021).