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Jacobus de Kerle (1531/32-1591) : Komponieren im Spannungsfeld von Kirche und Kunst

This monograph provides the first comprehensive evaluation of the works of Jacobus de Kerle and the cultural, aesthetic and religious factors that shaped them. At one level, the monograph is an exhaustive study of Kerle’s creative life, based on the painstaking re-evaluation of biographical evidence and own transcriptions of his works (nearly 1,000 pages of score, for the most part not edited before). At a higher discursive level, the monograph engages with fundamental historiographical and aesthetic questions, using Kerle as a key figure to exemplify the changing demands on sacred music in the Age of Confessionalisation.

Jacobus de Kerle was known to music historians primarily as Palestrina’s contender for the epithet ‘saviour of church music’. The monograph unpicks the precarious consequences of this attribute for the study of Kerle and the historiography of 16th-century music. On this basis, it re-examines Kerle’s career as composer of sacred music in Flanders, Italy, Germany and Bohemia, who constantly re-negotiated the conflicting factors of religious/denominational and aesthetic concerns. Art and religion, while often making opposing demands on a composer, were far from incompatible, but provoked the creative mind to a variety of musical responses, tailored to varying circumstances.