Finding God in the Night Sky: Revelation and Devotion in Domestic Music, 1762–1798

Throughout history, the night sky has captivated the imaginations of both artists and philosophers alike. Yet, its perception underwent a profound transformation spurred by the rise and general acceptance of the “New Sciences”. No longer were the movements of celestial bodies seen simply as manifestations of divine intervention; instead, they were understood as governed by natural laws, ordained by God. The night sky emerged as a luminous stage for divine revelation. On the other hand, the endless dimensions of the sky and the constant discovery of new celestial bodies like Uranus in 1781 illustrated the limits of human comprehension. Because of the acknowledgement of this, several theologians use the night sky as an allegory for God’s sublime being, of which only parts can be understood, and thus, humans must rely upon revealed faith and tradition. Lastly, towards the end of the 18^th century, the so-called pantheism controversy drew broader attention to theological movements that saw nature not as divided from deity, but the deity as the one substance in nature. According to them, nature does not demonstrate divine attributes but is in itself divine.

The plurality of these theological strategies of using the night sky as a hermeneutic key to divine revelation is reflected in hymns and religious arias produced in the latter half of the 18^th century. They cumulate in the works produced by the circle around the family Münter in Copenhagen, active from c. 1760 to 1800. Balthasar Münter, priest for the German Congregation at Sankt Petri Kirke, published three collections of religious songs, set to music by various composers like Ernst Wilhelm Wolf and Carl Philipp Emanuel as well as Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach. Like her father, Münter’s daughter, Friederike Brun, was active as religious poet as well. Composers who worked with her texts were amongst others Friedrich Ludwig Æmilius Kunzen and Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, with whom she had a deep friendship. Both Münter and Brun stood in close contact with a huge number of intellectuals, theologians, poets, and musicians. The works produced by this network reveals a close collaboration between text writers and composers, in which writers would also act as musicians, and musicians would participate in theological debates. 

Therefore, this project is interdisciplinary in its core. The repertoire of hymns, chorales and religious songs is read as musical, theological, and socio-cultural sources, as they provide insights in performance practices, co-existing theological systems, and devotion. Additional sources from these areas, written in both German and Danish, contextualise the repertoire and support its interpretation.

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Jan Temme de Vries is currently pursuing his doctoral research within the framework of the “NightMuse” project at the University of Basel. He holds a Master’s degree in Musicology and Medieval Studies as well as a Magister degree in Theology. Following his studies at the universities of Freiburg, Vienna, and Oslo, he has served as a guest researcher at the Center for Grundtvig Studies in Aarhus (2022), the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden (2023/24), the University of Groningen (2023/24), and the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen (2025). He has been active as a church musician since the age of 11 and currently holds the position as main organist at the church St. Peter und Paul, Allschwil.

“Because Night is Perfection”: Sacred and Devotional Musicking During the Night in 17th-Century Secular Contexts

What did religious and devotional musicking at night look like in secular contexts in seventeenth-century Italy? What repertoires, musical behaviours, topics, instruments and styles were associated with the sacred representation of the night in the age between the completion of the Council of Trent (1563) and the epilogue of the War of the Spanish Succession (1715)?

In order to address these questions, the project focuses on Bologna across the long seventeenth century as its primary case study. In the decades following Trent, sacred and devotional practices unfolding after sunset acquired an increasingly marked theatrical dimension, turning piety into a visible, embodied, and public spectacle that permeated secular, civic and courtly life as much as strictly ecclesiastical settings. Guided by the pedagogical principle of docere et delectare, religious experience was expected not merely to instruct but to move the faithful, engaging their senses and emotions. Occasions such as sepolcri, processions after dark, the quarantore (forty hours’ devotion), Lenten devotions, Eucharistic adorations, and the Masses of Christmas and Easter, promoted also by institutions such as the city’s literary and musical academies and religious orders like the Oratorians (Padri Filippini), active in Bologna since the second decade of the century, became highly structured, recurrent moments in which music, space, movement and visual display converged to produce powerful collective experiences, periodically transforming the acoustic and sensory profile of the city.

The research draws on a deliberately heterogeneous body of sources: musical scores and printed anthologies; documentary sources, such as the gazette Il Bologna (founded in 1642), rules and dispatches of the legate, diplomatic reports, daily records, account books, confraternal chronicles and memoirs, pamphlets and commemorative librettos; and visual sources documenting civic ceremonies and ephemeral spectacle. Examples are drawn both from ordinary devotional practices and from public entertainments, allowing an investigation of how the entanglement of sacred and civic spheres, and the dynamic between interior and exterior urban spaces, shaped musical life after dark. A key methodological premise concerns the ore italiane, the system of time reckoning used throughout the Italian Peninsula until the Napoleonic period, in which the new day began about half an hour after sunset. This has important implications for interpretating historical documents, particularly when reconstructing the light conditions under which events took place.

The reconsideration of musical activity as marked and influenced by day and night, and an overall view of music as a complex cultural and sociological phenomenon, will allow a multifaceted outlook on musicking in seventeenth-century Bologna, illuminating in particular how the practical and expressive demands of nocturnal devotion shaped the writing of music in genres such as the oratorio, the sacred cantata, and vernacular devotional compositions.

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Federico Lanzellotti received his PhD in Musicology from the Universities of Bologna and Madrid in 2022. He was subsequently a research fellow at the University of Padua and a researcher at the Conservatory of Venice. He is the author of a monograph on Carlo Ambrogio Lonati (Brepols, 2025) and the editor of two forthcoming volumes for the opera omnia of Giovanni Bononcini (Fondazione Arcadia) and Giuseppe Tartini (Bärenreiter). His main research interests include the philology and dramaturgy of music, with a particular focus on the 17th- and 18th-century serenata and violin sonata, as well as contemporary music, especially the musical theatre of Silvia Colasanti. He is also active in the fields of musical heritage and music education. He is a member of various national and international cultural institutions dedicated to the promotion of music and collaborates with the Fondazione Levi in Venice, the academic journals Musica Docta (editorial board) and Ex Chordis (advisory board), and the International Baroque Festival “Grandezze e Meraviglie” in Modena (executive board). He is also a contributor to the online DEUMM. 

ORCID: 0000-0001-6084-6997