The two settings of Ein’ feste Burg in Ex. 18-5 are at two textural extremes. The first is by Martin
Agricola (1486–1556), the choirmaster at the Protestant “Lateinschule” or humanist academy for boys at
Magdeburg in Eastern Germany (hence his Latinized pen name). In its homespun simplicity it is almost a
discant setting. The other, which sports as much motetlike pseudo-imitation as the composer could work
into it without altogether compromising the tenor’s ascendancy, is the work of Stephan Mahu, a composer
in the service of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand I (a Hapsburg and therefore a member of the ruling
family of the Holy Roman Empire), who like Sennfl was probably a sympathetic or nationalistic Catholic,
not a Lutheran. The settings are representative of their composers’ positions: Mahu’s is internationalist,
ars-perfectified; Agricola’s is provincial, wholly indigenous, Lutheran-specific.
That both styles were welcomed and deemed useful within the big tent of Lutheranism is clear from
the fact that they appeared together in the most comprehensive musical publication of the early Lutheran
church, the Newe deudsche geistliche Gesenge (“New German sacred songs”), a collection of 123 four-
and five-part settings for school use, published at Wittenberg in 1544 by Georg Rhau, a church musician
who became the more or less official printer to the Reformation church, and for whom the Lutheran revolt