‘Don’t gawp up at it!’ Listening to the organ in early Lutheranism (Dr Anna Steppler, Peterhouse)

In the first century after Luther’s Reformation, debates flared up time and again over perceived remnants of papist superstition. The organ frequently came under fire in Protestant spaces, representative of musical excess and overt splendour, its continued presence far from assured. As a physical object, it was swept up into debates over idolatry, causing Lutheran theologians and music theorists alike to centre the organ's living sonic presence as justification for its religious purpose. Lutheranism actively promoted attentive, reasoned listening as integral to faith. Centred on hearing the sermon, this intense, directed attention also became associated with finding meaning in the organ’s textless music. This desire for instrumental music to bear meaning – and the fear that it did not – reveals early modern attitudes to (instrumental) voices and the rationality (or not) of musical sound, and offers a glimpse into how one might learn to listen c1600. Dr Steppler will be playing a programme inspired by this research at Trinity College Chapel in the pre-evensong organ music on Sunday November 17th (5:40pm). Extensive chorale fantasias by Michael Praetorius (1609) and Samuel Scheidt (1624) will be interweaved with lighter pieces from the Susanne van Soldt manuscript (1599) giving an opportunity to listen to the organ ‘in the Lutheran manner.

ANNA STEPPLER is Junior Research Fellow in Music at Peterhouse. An organist, she combines scholarship and performance, and her work centres on the organ as both creator of sacred space and site of cultural knowledge, ideals, and exploration across history. She received her Ph.D. in Musicology from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY, December 2022) for her dissertation “Michael Praetorius, the Organ, and the Possibilities of Instrumental Music,” which argues for the organ’s pivotal role in discussions of instrumental music in Lutheran courtly circles before the Thirty Years’ War, and was awarded Cornell’s Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize for an exceptional dissertation in Music. She is currently expanding this research into a monograph. Her work has appeared in various forums including Journal of Musicology, The Organ Yearbook and Women & Music.