Music in the Thirty Years War: Towards an Emotional History of Listening

This paper considers music's contribution to the affective ecology of the Thirty Years War through engaging with recent approaches in the history of the emotions. It proposes that music constituted a unique kind of "emotive" that can offer insights into the corporeal, psychological, and social dimensions of emotional experiences at the time. With reference to some particularly dissonant moments in Heinrich Schütz's output, I suggest not only that such dissonance could cause listeners actual physical discomfort, but that this discomfort formed a necessary element in the penitential process. This music’s efficacy thus reached beyond the domain of affective representation to offer a powerful form of sonic catharsis