Open Collections

Milewski, Patricia

University of British Columbia

This doctoral dissertation is dedicated to the lyrical productivity of the early modern female author Gertrud Möller (1637–1705), whose spiritual and secular poetry was set to music primarily by the composer Johann Sebastiani (1622–83) in two published volumes: Erster Theil Der Parnaß-Blumen/ Oder Geist- und Weltliche Lieder (1672) and Ander Theil der Parnaß-Blumen (1675) (Flowers of Parnassus, Part 1 and Flowers of Parnassus, Part 2). This corpus of music-notated poetry consisting of 127 songs was published after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) within the musical-literary tradition of the Prussian university city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). The songbooks are important artifacts of early modern German domestic song culture and constitute a remarkable example of collaboration between a female poet and a male composer that has largely been overlooked in literary and musicological research to date. With a spotlight on aspects of collaboration, I approach the volumes from the perspective of “voice and voicing,” where voice refers to the historical text and voicing refers to its aesthetic and social performative potential embedded in layered systems of address. This includes a review of Möller’s extant publications and their interrelation to the material corpus, case studies of selected songs and their historic reception, and a full registry of the individual songs with concise analysis of the interplay of words and music as evidence of the collaborative process.

Text; Moving Image; Sound

2024-10-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89409

Germanic Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/