Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present

R. Ahrendt, M. Ferraguto, D. Mahiet, R. Ahrendt, M. Ferraguto, D. Mahiet

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137468321
• eBook ISBN: 9781137463272
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

How does music shape the exercise of diplomacy, the pursuit of power, and the conduct of international relations? Drawing together international scholars with backgrounds in musicology, ethnomusicology, political science, cultural history, and communication, this volume interweaves historical, theoretical, and practical perspectives.

Part I

REPRESENTATION

1

CONCEALED MUSIC IN EARLY MODERN DIPLOMATIC CEREMONIAL

Arne Spohr

MUSIC AS AN INSTRUMENT OF EARLY MODERN CEREMONIAL

Early modern court ceremonial aimed to demonstrate and communicate princely power as being rooted in transcendent truth. Ceremonial also functioned to discipline court society and guarantee a frictionless interaction between its representatives.¹ To do so, ceremonial employed objects and other instruments to impress upon all the senses the meaning of majesty, power, and authority. Such instruments could be insignia, acoustic signals, music, food, odors, or works of art as well as the architectural design of buildings, rooms, and gardens. Together these instruments formed, in Jörg Jochen Berns’s words, “a media-strategic system for the creation and maintenance of power.”²

Music represented an integral part of early modern court ceremonial. Music was heard during services in the court chapel, at table, and in court entertainments such as tournaments, plays, ballets, masques, and operas, as well as during receptions of diplomats. Music had various functions in ceremonial contexts. Most generally, it represented cultural capital, demonstrating to outside visitors that a prince was conversant with current cultural developments and could compete with his rivals on this level. It also structured ceremonial actions, such as the beginning of a dinner ceremony that was frequently announced by the sound of trumpets and kettledrums. The functional value of music within a ceremony was not only determined by the use of certain musical instruments or repertoires, but also by how it was displayed visually and spatially and by its combination with the visual arts to create specific effects that could be utilized for ceremonial purposes.³

This essay investigates a particular spatial arrangement used at several central and northern European courts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that thematized the visual absence of performing musicians in the context of ceremonial. Usually, court musicians were visible during their performances. As contemporary pictorial sources demonstrate, they were, for instance, present at court balls, positioned either close to the dancers or further away in musicians’ galleries. At court festivals, such as tournament pageants or ballets, they could be seen and heard as lavishly dressed allegorical, mythological, or exotic figures. However, they could also be concealed from view, so that their sound created effects of “magic and mystery” through the “socially abnormal rupture of sound from sight,” while at the same time their absent bodies were replaced by works of art, such as sculptures and paintings.⁴ This form of musical display was considered as a cultural current worthy of recording: contemporary sources such as festival accounts, diaries, and building descriptions refer explicitly to such manifestations, often using formulaic wording. Many German sources use the same specific term, “verborgene Musik,” best rendered in English as “hidden” or “concealed music.”⁵

Pleasure houses (Lusthäuser), smaller buildings in residential complexes that were designed for princely leisure and powerful display, were often sites for this kind of musical display as well as other acoustic experiments.⁶ Some of the most celebrated of these buildings contained built-in provisions for concealed music, among them the Neues Lusthaus in Stuttgart, the Dresden Lusthaus, the Rondell in Jindřichův Hradec (Neuhaus), Bohemia, and Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, Denmark. Given the significance of these buildings—the Stuttgart Lusthaus was regarded by contemporaries as one of the foremost examples—concealed music is revealed as a significant cultural phenomenon of late Renaissance Europe that deserves further investigation.

This chapter focuses on the use and function of concealed music within a special case of court ceremonial, diplomatic ceremonial.⁷ One of the most revealing and vivid accounts of concealed music in a ceremonial context was authored by a diplomat, the Frenchman Charles Ogier (1595–1654). Ogier was secretary to a French diplomatic mission to Denmark, Sweden, and Poland between 1634 and 1636, led by ambassador Claude des Mesmes, Count d’Avaux. Ogier later published his diary of this journey as Ephemerides, sive iter Danicum, Svecicum, Polonicum in 1656.⁸ The French delegation spent fifteen weeks in Denmark, where it attended the wedding of Prince-Elect Christian of Denmark and Saxon princess Magdalena Sibylla, the so-called Great Wedding, a dynastic celebration that “was marked by the most spectacular court festival held in continental Europe during the Thirty Years’ War . . . and perhaps during the entire first half of the seventeenth century.”⁹ Ogier’s account contains important information on the practice of diplomatic ceremonial in general, such as the ceremonial significance of music and acoustic signals. Especially notable is his extended description of concealed music during a private reception in a Lusthaus of King Christian IV.¹⁰ It raises the general question of the functions and intentions of this practice: did the king use the technology of concealment primarily for practical means, since the audience room in Rosenborg was rather small and would not have been able to accommodate a large musical ensemble? Did he also use it for propagandistic purposes, by drawing on the Neoplatonic concepts of the macro- and microcosms, and the harmony of the spheres?

To provide a background for my close reading of Ogier’s account and my discussion of the significance of concealed music in diplomatic ceremonial, I will first provide an overview of what is currently known about spaces for this type of musical display in central and northern Europe around 1600, and then show how concealed music functioned in each case and how it concurred with visual arts.

PLEASURE HOUSES AS PLACES OF CONCEALED MUSIC IN CENTRAL AND NORTHERN EUROPE, CA. 1600

The Neues Lusthaus in Stuttgart was built between 1583 and 1593 under the direction of architect Georg Beer, during the reign of Duke Ludwig of Württemberg (1578–93).¹¹ Situated in the ducal pleasure garden northwest of the main castle, it was a massive, two-story structure with a rectangular floor plan, a column-supported terrace encircling the whole building, four turrets, and beautifully decorated Renaissance gables. The ground floor contained water basins and fountains, while the surrounding walls were adorned by portraits of royalty and nobility. The large hall on the upper floor, splendidly decorated with ceiling paintings, was used for court festivals in connection with dynastic occasions such as weddings or baptisms.¹²

According to several early descriptions and festival accounts, the Neues Lusthaus had built-in provisions for concealed music. As Johann Jakob Gabelkover notes in his Chronica der fürstlichen Württembergischen Hauptstadt Stuttgart (1621), there were two “concealed rooms” (verborgene gemach) above the main doors leading into the hall in the first floor. Musical ensembles were placed in these rooms, so they could not be seen from the hall (Gabelkover emphasizes their “secret” character by calling them heimlich music).¹³ In each of these rooms there was also an organ, one of them automated. The music rooms were connected to the main hall by oval-shaped openings to transmit the sound of the hidden ensembles. A contemporary visual representation of the hall, Franz Brentel’s “Wahre Contrafactur des Saahls in dem Fürstlichen Württembergischen Lusthauß zu Stuetgarten” (1619), shows the oval sound holes framed by a complex arrangement of reliefs and sculptures, suggesting an underlying iconographic program.¹⁴ On the right side of the hall the sound hole was surrounded by flag bearers, soldiers with halberds, and a group of three male musicians situated above the hole. On the left side, the sound hole was framed in a similar way, but with female figures, many of them musicians (see figures 1.1 and 1.2). It appears that the two doorways were intended as gendered spaces, juxtaposing attributes of the Female (female musicians who perhaps represented the Nine Muses) and the Male (warriors representing the sphere of Mars).

As Jakob Frischlin’s rhymed description of the Neues Lusthaus dating from the end of the sixteenth century suggests, the sculptures and the concealed music were perceived as a multimedia arrangement to create synesthetic effects, merging the visual and the aural. Frischlin writes that it seemed to the observer as if the marble soldiers on the doorframe produced the sound of the music with their armaments.¹⁵ This effect echoes the special predilection of Duke Ludwig, the commissioner of this building, for musical instruments that resembled the shape of armaments, such as halberds and guns.¹⁶ It is also clear from a festival account of a 1609 wedding that the concealed music created a particular ethereal sound effect, which evoked, together with the concealment of the musicians, transcendent ideas such as the harmony of the heavens—an aspect that will be discussed in more detail later.¹⁷

The Dresden Lusthaus, situated on the Jungfernbastei, Dresden’s defense system overlooking the Elbe river, was, like the Neues Lusthaus, one of the most significant and widely known pleasure houses in the German speaking lands around 1600. It also contained built-in p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Representation
• Part II Mediation
• Part III Negotiation
• Afterword: Music’s Powers
• Notes on Contributors
• Index