Cultural and social reverberations of Lutheran Church Music in Early Modern Sweden

The project " Cultural and Social Reverberations of the Music of a Lutheran State Church within and without its Contexts "aims at a broader and deeper understanding of the special aspects of Swedish music, literature and scholarship that relate to a set of established liturgical melodies.

These were well known to virtually all Swedish inhabitants for hundreds of years (even those who did not speak the Swedish language). Through millions of strictly regulated and recurring performances, they are by all accounts among the most performed melodies in Sweden ever, and perhaps also the most socially and culturally significant factors in the creation of a culturally unified society, with different ritual and symbolic significance for different groups in society. The way in which these melodies reached the people of the society institutionally and organizationally anticipates modern concert and worship life, through performances in three singing situations clearly delimited and practically monopolized by the church. The melodies in question (mainly the formulas for accentus singing (biblical texts), chorale paraphrases in the Ordinary of the Mass (fixed liturgical texts) and songs from and about the school and scholarly environment) are largely unknown to most people today. The imprints they left within and outside the church context are, however, clearly discernible when we today read, listen to and look at cultural artifacts from the Reformation onwards. Only when their historical manifestations are understood concretely and in detail within their musical and liturgical context can we understand and explain their occurrence in cultural artifacts: in homiletics, rhetorical and political texts, secular music from all periods, in private correspondence, phraseology, in terminology in early modern Swedish and modern Latin, as well as in film and popular music in modern times. Three different sub-studies examine how melodies with roots in the Middle Ages came to be one of the most enduring cultural expressions Sweden has had. It would hardly have been imagined during the late Middle Ages that the melody " Veni sancte spiritus" was to be sung in the Sami language, with various culture-specific references to Lapland in the translation, but that is exactly what happened in the 17th century, when a number of medieval melodies were given a concrete Sami application. Nor could anyone have guessed during the Reformation that Nikolaus Decius' chorale melodies would spread and be used among the Lenape people in the Delaware Delta colony of Nova Suecia, which was the case from 1638 until the 1780s. If people's living conditions are studied only through economic, legislative and social data, a non-self-owning individual in early modern times can be considered extremely powerless. Therefore, it is very important to consider source material where such individuals have their parish priest tried by the cathedral chapter for departing from the conventions for the specified recitation melodies for the sung epistle on Sunday. Such sources illustrate not only that interest in these melodies existed in all social classes, but that individuals in all social classes were able to make use of a profound understanding of how they functioned and were to be performed. Taken together, the three sub-studies show how music flows over linguistic, political and demographic barriers, into the part of the world that is not now Sweden, and within Swedish society so that their after-effects are still noticeable today. In some cases, these involve melodies that are completely forgotten today, in other cases those that continuously leave an imprint on all areas of culture even in our own time, but where their liturgical origin is unknown to those who pass them on.