Catching the Atmosphere. Music-Writing and Materiality in Early Modern Europe
The lecture explores music as a central practice of Christian materiality in early modern Europe by focusing on the act and the senses of writing music. Rather than approaching music primarily as a sounding or aesthetic phenomenon, it understands musical notation as a medium that stabilizes, orders, and transmits affective presence. In this sense, musicwriting emerges as a technique through which immaterial affects – such as atmosphere, and religious disposition in general – are bound into material forms.
Drawing on theological concepts ode to mediation and incarnation as well as perspectives from the history of the body, the lecture examines how musical practices shaped and regulated embodied religious experience across different confessional contexts. By addressing key moments of human life – birth, lived experience, and death – the lecture shows how music participated in the formation of Christian understandings of presence, affect, and materiality. Musicwriting thus appears as a crucial, yet often overlooked, site where theology, bodily experience, and material culture intersect in early modern Christianity.
Dr. theol. Stefan Michels is professor for Church History at Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Germany. His research fields are on Reformation History, theological interpretation on Music (Bach, Telemann, Mendelssohn, Britten), and on global history of Christianity, Liberation Theology and its history in a postcolonial perspective.
