UC Berkeley

Berlin, around 1800, has been considered the cradle of modern theology, as well as the epicenter of modern musical aesthetics and musical institutions. Without taking these coeval changes for granted, this dissertation addresses how music became a category of modern knowledge, arguing for its simultaneous and interdependent emergence with the field of religion. It does so by tracing what “church music” meant and how it was practiced in Prussia’s capital, exploring its print media, pedagogical methods, moral philosophies, and cultural institutions in Berlin. Kirchenmusik had long been a corporate expression of worship practiced in discrete civic locales. During the eighteenth century, its repertoire integrated with the informal, scattered sites of Protestant “domestic devotion” through print, which disrupted church music’s accompanying educational models, musical genres, and liturgical functions. The Romantic witnesses to these transformations, such as Wilhelm Wackenroder and E. T. A. Hoffmann, mounted new critiques of church music, taking for granted its ecumenical, trans-historical form, and advocated for its resuscitation by the political institutions of the city. The political and pedagogical interventions prescribed by those critiques disclosed music to Berlin’s new and revamped institutions of knowledge, such as the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts (est. 1809) and the University of Berlin (est. 1810). Through these institutions, music became subject to new scientific modes of inquiry. As it unpacks the relation of music and religion during this crucial period, this dissertation resists secularization narratives that have long bolstered histories of sacred music, demonstrating that music did not replace religious transcendence in German Romanticism, as is commonly claimed; nor was religion in any sort of decline. Instead, music and religion, I argue, recuperated and reconstituted one another in ways found audible in Romantic Kirchenmusik, culminating in their co-establishment as fields of study in the liberal modern university.