ABSTRACT
At the end of August 1584, when the city council of Augsburg received two written denunciations of a weaver who had been singing anti-Catholic songs in the streets, the memory of religious strife was still fresh. The polyphonic music cultivated by the Protestant cantorate of St Anna was eclectic and ecumenical. The Protestant musical reaction against the increasing Catholic assertiveness took place instead at the level of popular culture, as poorer men and women created, circulated and sang monophonic songs criticizing the Pope, the Jesuits and Catholic elements within the city council. The patrician control of the city and its guarantee of religious freedom to the Catholic minority created the basis for Catholic renewal in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The first musical manifestation of this renewal came in 1561, when the cathedral chapter established a permanent cantorate with a Kapellmeister charged with the direction and composition of polyphonic music.
