“That Hart May Sing in Corde:” Defense of Church Music in the Psalm Paraphrases of Matthew Parker

Translation of sacred texts is always a dangerous act. In the sixteenth century, translators of the Bible into vernacular languages faced persecution and even execution for their perceived heresy. Nevertheless, when Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker (1504-1575) published his poetic paraphrases of the biblical psalms, for which Thomas Tallis wrote the corresponding psalm tunes, Parker joined a growing number of scholars and clerics risking the translation of scripture under the aegis of the Protestant Reformation. In his paraphrases Parker carefully negotiated between strict translation and poetic interpretation of the text, particularly in regards to musical themes. I argue that in his psalm paraphrases, Parker advanced a musico-theological justification for the inclusion of music in liturgy during an era when vocal polyphony and instrumental music in sacred settings fomented the suspicion of many proto-Puritan Protestant reformers. Comparison of the printed 1567 text with Parker’s original manuscript held at the Inner Temple Library in London reveals that Parker often chose explicitly musical terms in his paraphrases of the psalms. In doing so, he provided foundational justification for establishing a central role for music in Anglican liturgy, harnessing all the tools of his humanist training and the power of his position to advance his conviction that music, far from distracting congregants, enriched and uplifted them spiritually. Drawing on recent scholarship on the genre of metrical psalmody, I demonstrate how Parker’s art of paraphrase facilitated his multifaceted defense of church music in the face of increasingly hostile factions within the English Protestant Church

Bach And God

Bach & God explores the religious character of Bach\u27s vocal and instrumental music in seven interrelated essays. Noted musicologist Michael Marissen offers wide-ranging interpretive insights from careful biblical and theological scrutiny of the librettos. Yet he also shows how Bach\u27s pitches, rhythms, and tone colors can make contributions to a work\u27s plausible meanings that go beyond setting texts in an aesthetically satisfying manner. In some of Bach\u27s vocal repertory, the music puts a spin on the words in a way that turns out to be explainable as orthodox Lutheran in its orientation. In a few of Bach\u27s vocal works, his otherwise puzzlingly fierce musical settings serve to underscore now unrecognized or unacknowledged verbal polemics, most unsettlingly so in the case of his church cantatas that express contempt for Jews and Judaism. Finally, even Bach\u27s secular instrumental music, particularly the late collections of abstract learned counterpoint, can powerfully project certain elements of traditional Lutheran theology. Bach\u27s music is inexhaustible, and Bach & God suggests that through close contextual study there is always more to discover and learn

Liturgy and Social Justice

(Excerpt) As a prelude to this vast subject, I would like to read a passage which is becoming part of my contemporary canon, a scene from Toni Morrison\u27s novel Beloved. She describes a worship service--though it is indeed quite different from most of our liturgies! This service is led by a holy woman named Baby Suggs. She is an elderly black woman, born into slavery and later bought into freedom by her son. Now, she lives in her own home on her own piece of ground near a little town in Ohio. Every Saturday, when warm weather came, Baby Suggs would gather the people--all of them former slaves--in the Clearing (with a capital C) ... In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the Clearing while the people waited among the trees

A survey of eight successful enrichment programs.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The development of a handbook for Nashua Junior High School students

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The Aftermath of Aftermath: The Impact of Digital Music Distribution on the Recording Industry

[Excerpt] “This article will address the impact the shift from hard-copy recordings to digital music distribution has had on the recording industry. Specifically, it will apply F.B.T. Productions v. Aftermath Records, which correctly held that a label’s relationship with third-party-digital-music-providers is that of licensor-licensee, to the modern music industry. Based on this holding, record labels need to reconsider their relationships with artists, and create new business models that rely on licensing music, rather than the traditional sale-based distribution model. The decision in Aftermath will lead to increased royalties for artists in the Digital Age. This article will analyze the impact of that decision for the modern music industry by advocating for increased artist royalties in this digital music era. By examining other relevant case law, the fundamental purpose of royalty distributions, and the evolution of the recording industry, this article will emphasize the need for the recording industry to adapt to the changing musical landscape and suggest possible business models.

MESON2000 Conference Summary

This short contribution is a {\it lite} MESON2000 conference summary. As appropriate for the 600th anniversary of the Jagellonian University, it begins with a brief summary of the last 600 years of European history and its place in hadron physics. Next a ``physicist chirality'' order parameter PC is introduced. When applied to MESON2000 plenary speakers this order parameter illustrates the separation of hadron physicists into disjoint communities. The individual plenary talks in MESON2000 are next sorted according to the subconference associated with each of the 36 plenary speakers. Finally, I conclude with a previously unreported Feynman story regarding the use of models in hadron physics.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, uses appolb.cps and epsfig. MESON2000 Conference Summary Tal

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and the Trap of Inhalt (Content) and Form: An Information Perspective on Music Copyright

In the digital environment, copyright law has become trapped in an assessment of what has been taken, rather than what has been done with copied materials and elements. This expands the scope of copyright into areas where it should not find infringement (such as sampling, mash-ups and other transformative uses) while encouraging activities that are problematic (such as hiding sources). This article argues that the trap was laid by the German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte whose influential 1793 article Proof of the Unlawfulness of Reprinting for the first time distinguishes Inhalt (i.e. content free to all) and Form (i.e. the author’s inalienable expression) as copyright categories. It is shown that Fichte’s structure conflates norms of communication and norms of transaction. An alternative path for copyright law in an information society is sketched from a separation of these norms: copying should be assessed from (i) the attribution of sources, and (ii) the degree to which original and derivative materials compete with each other. Throughout the article, transformative practices in music set the scene

Accessing the content of nineteenth-century periodicals: the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project

Nineteenth-century periodicals significantly outnumber books from that era, and present historians with an immensely valuable set of sources, but their use is constrained by the difficulty of identifying relevant material. For many periodicals, contents pages and volume indexes have been the only guide, and the few subject indexes that exist usually provide only an indication of the subjects mentioned in the article titles. By contrast, the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project (SciPer) indexed the science content of general-interest periodicals by skim-reading the entire text. The project’s approach to indexing is described and the relative merits of indexing and digitization in aiding researchers to locate relevant material are discussed. The article concludes that, notwithstanding the more sophisticated search interfaces of more recent retrodigitization projects, human indexing still has an important role to play in providing access to the content of historic periodicals and in mapping their data structure