Mustering Troops and Teaching Counterpoint: The Musical Incursions of a Central European Redemption Confraternity

In 1624, a print was issued in Vienna to mark the formal institution of the Communio hierarchiae plentitudinis Aetatis Jesu, a confraternity charged with consoling Christians held captive by the Ottoman Turks. Noting the Redemption confraternities connected to the Trinitarian and Mercedarian Orders, the author claimed that in every corner of Spain, 'rivers of mercy' flowed to comfort those in Muslim captivity, while the inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire closed their ears to the groans of Christians imprisoned by the Ottoman Turks. Having recently founded a pan-European military order in order to curb Turkish advances in the Mediterranean, the new confraternity's principal benefactor, Michael Adolph von Althann, set about recruiting and training a musical legion. This paper traces the sonic influences and repercussions of Althann's brotherhood, connecting his centuria musica to an ambitious 1628 anthology of stile nuovo motets, a 1629 digest of Zarlinian music theory by the Genoese Franciscan Carlo Abbate and, not least, the multitudes of musical youths educated in the Piarist schools instituted by the Madrid-born Archbishop of Olomouc, Franz Seraph of Dietrichstein. Equipped both to console and to redeem, Althann's musical militia opened up new fronts in the battle for Central European souls.