Performing Music from Moravian Collections

Abstract

abstract:A significant amount of historical musical repertoire primarily from the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries exists in collections of the Moravian Church. This is a resource for extended knowledge of music aesthetics' of the Moravian Church, as well as for historical music in a wider perspective. This article focuses on musical performance practices and proposes a theoretical framework that can promote a performance taking into account significant aspects of the social context. Key concepts include emotion for feelings per se, emotional community for a collective where participants developed and shared a matrix for emotions and emotive as an operational concept in the work process of the musical performance. The concepts are motivated by the emphasis on the affective dimension in the spirituality. Finally, a suite of three duets with instrumental accompaniment by Christian Gregor serves as an example of application of emotive in the process of preparing a musical performance.