Agenda

Early Modern Lutheran shower songs: washing bodies with water and music

Mark Seow
Violinist, musicologist, writer and broadcaster, mdw - Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien

Abstract:
In early modern Germany, liquid was a common metaphor in writings on devotional music making. Music was described by composers, theorists, and theologians to be “poured” by God into Creation and to “flow” from a performer’s heart to a listener’s ears. Upon entering a listener’s body, music stirred the affections
and altered the flow of bodily humors.
As recent literary scholarship has emphasised, water in early modern religious writing transgresses the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical. As Hetta Elizabeth Howes and James Smith (2019) has argued, water acted “not only as a metaphor, but as an intellectual framework, a nexus, a mode of meaning”. How, then, did it feel for early modern Lutherans as they listened to music-as-water? Could listening to music in church, even without the literal touch of water against skin, have felt like bathing?
This paper explores the tangible implications of the metaphor of water for Lutherans practising aural worship. In his devotional manual and hymnal of 1655, the Lutheran pastor Johann Rittmeyer encouraged his readers to sing specific songs while they bathed. During such bathing rituals, music and water coalesced into a substance that cleaned body and soul. By approaching metaphor not merely as an adornment of language but rather as a way in which language shaped tangible experiences, this paper reconfigures
congregational listening as a mode of bathing.

Biography:
Dr Mark Seow is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC-project “GOING VIRAL: Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679–1919)” at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (mdw). Mark previously held the position of AHRC DTP1 Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he also received his doctorate in musicology. Alongside academia, Mark is a professional violinist, a broadcaster for BBC Radio, and a critic for Gramophone.

Evento organizzato nell’ambito del progetto
“Water-Cultures. The Water Cultures of Italy, 1500-1900”
(PI prof. D. Gentilcore)

Comitato organizzatore
Prof. D. Gentilcore, Dott.ssa G. Bruno, Dott.ssa L. Maddaluno, Dott. Oscar Schiavone, Dott.ssa R. Scuro, Dott. S. Valenti

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This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research programme (GA n° 833834)
Image credit | page from the Achtliederbuch (1524), Lutheran hymnal, Luther, Martin Bayerische Staatsbibliothek