FIG. 18-1 The beginning of the Reformation: Martin Luther posts his ninety-five theses on the church door at Wittenberg.
It cannot be said that music ranked very high on the Reformation agenda, but the effects of the
Reformation were felt very keenly in the musical sphere. For it was a revolt within the very stronghold of
cultivated music, the source of much or most of its richest patronage. Just think how much of the music we
have considered up to now has been bound up with the liturgy that was now coming under attack, and how
much the now-suspect opulence of the Roman church hierarchy had meant to the material support of
musicians, especially those whose work, committed to writing, forms the basis of music-with-a-history.
Under particularly ascetic “reform” conditions, one could imagine music leaving history again. And in
some of the reformed churches, it did just that.
For nowhere do the differences among the reformed churches show up more clearly than in their
attitudes toward music. What they shared was a hostility to the pope’s music: rich, professionalized, out
of touch with ordinary life—just like the hierarchical clergy itself. What they hated, in other words, was
the ars perfecta, whose very perfection now came under moral suspicion. But musical agreement among
the reformers ended there. They had no united positive vision of music’s place in religion.
Most negative of all was John Calvin (1504–64), the Geneva reformer, whose emphasis on austerity
and complete rejection of the sacraments left very little room for music in his services, and none at all for
professional music. The only musical artifact of the Calvinist or Huguenot Church was the Geneva
Psalter, a book of psalms put into metrical verse (partly by the famous poet Clément Marot) for singing to
the tunes (or timbres) of popular songs. It was first published in 1543 and reissued three times thereafter
with various harmonizations by the one-time chanson composer (and eventual Huguenot martyr) Claude
Goudimel (ca. 1514–72).
These psalm settings were similar in concept to Jacobus Clemen’s Souterliedekens, briefly discussed
and sampled in chapter 15, but far simpler. Goudimel’s preface to the last edition, published in 1565,
strongly implies that even the simplest polyphonic psalm harmonizations were rejected as frills in
Calvinist services, to be allowed only in home devotions. For all practical purposes, then, the Calvinist
Church turned its back on music as an art. To the extent that music was cultivated as an art, it had no place
in church; to the extent it had a place in church, it was to be “uncultivated” and unlettered. The same could
be said for the Swiss German reformed church of Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), which was of all the
Protestant churches the most hostile to liturgy, and which sponsored public burnings of organs and
liturgical music-books.
The great exception to this pervasive music-hatred was the largest and most successful of the
Reformed churches, the Lutheran; and as Luther was quick to point out, there was a lesson in that.
Although he was by far the most spectacular and histrionic of the reformers, Luther was in some ways the
most conservative, retaining a far more regular and organized liturgy than his counterparts, and in
particular keeping the sacrament of the Mass (renamed the Lord’s Supper in its modified Lutheran form).