Lee, David George (2018) Works in progress: early modern Lutheranism, labour, and the act of musical composition. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/81882/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/
[email protected] Works in Progress: Early Modern Lutheranism, Labour, and the Act of Musical Composition David George Lee A Thesis Submitted in Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music College of Arts University of Glasgow December 2017 ABSTRACT Even now, some twenty-five years after the publication of Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), musicologists still have issues talking about composers’ activities in terms of ‘works’. Central to Goehr’s thesis was her assertion that J.S. Bach ‘did not compose works.’ However, a significant number of texts by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lutheran German musicians and theorists explicitly depict composition as an act of working. For example, in Bach’s defence against the criticisms of Johann Adolph Scheibe, the Leipzig rhetorician Johann Abraham Birnbaum described how ‘the more industriously and painstakingly [the composer] works at the improvement of Nature — the more brilliantly shines the beauty thus brought into being.’ And the reception of Bach’s music in our own time is still inextricably bound up with the notion of work.